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The Canon of the Demigods, Act 2
Antiquity, on the Shore of the Black Sea
It was a beautiful land.
Dazzling sunshine lit its fields and forests, surrounded by an expanse of deep, blue sea.
The city-state of Themiskyra.
That land, named for the sacred sea, or possibly for its goddess herself, commanded a sweeping view of the fertile plains on the southern coast of the Black Sea. On it stood a city built primarily on oceangoing trade.
That city was spoken of in many tales—some had it that it was an island, surrounded by the sea on all sides, others that it was a peninsula, and still others that the power of the gods enabled it to shift freely between the two—but the most important point was not the city’s origin or geography but the people that ruled it.
The Amazons.
That tribe, also called the Amazones, was distinguished by being made up entirely of women. Except when those who desired offspring mingled with men of neighboring cities, hunting, agriculture, animal husbandry, and all other aspects of life were conducted entirely by women.
Men who took issue with that—kings of neighboring cities and groups of brigands who made their strongholds in the mountains—often attacked their city, but the Amazons beat back every assault.
Not only ordinary life but the military preparations essential to the defense of the city were managed entirely by women. Their skill in horseback riding and archery, in particular, was so impressive that word of it reached the cultures of distant Greece.
In Themiskyra was a queen.
Her mother was Otrere, a devout priestess of Artemis and a great woman who had had congress with Ares, once the god of war, and, despite being human, borne the god’s child.
Otrere’s daughter, however, surpassed her in heroism.
She was a priestess of the god of war and the queen of a people.
She was also a war-leader who rode in the vanguard and kicked up a storm of blood.
That young queen ruled powerfully over the surrounding lands with her might and wisdom, the divine aura and divine artefact she had inherited from the god of war, and the charisma to unite her sturdy warrior women.
On horseback, it was said, a sweep of her spear would part the sea and a shot from her bow would shake the forests. Her prowess was sufficient to inspire faith in her followers and terrified awe in neighboring cities, and her fame spread to distant Greece.
But . . . a turning point came for that queen and for all the Amazons.
A fateful wind carried a lone ship to Themiskyra.
Aboard it was a man who was then hailed in Greece—and who would be hailed by future generations—as a great hero.
It is said that the young queen was quite taken with him.
The reason for her attraction was simple, but that very simplicity made it complicated.
It was not a sense of duty to leave mighty offspring.
Nor was it a lust for physical pleasure.
Admiration.
When the queen, who until then had known no one truly strong except the gods, saw that man . . . she saw for the first time a man who was a fitting match for her origin, the god of war.
According to the surviving Amazons, the queen’s eyes shone then like the eyes of a child who had just been told tales of the Olympian gods.
The queen did not hesitate to grant that great hero, who said that he had come on the order of a king to obtain the belt of the god of war, permission to stay and to negotiate.
Of course, she had not let her emotions get the better of her or decided to give up the belt without a plan.
She decided to give up the belt after allowing any women of her tribe who wanted children to mingle with the heroes aboard the ship and entering into a trade agreement with the city-state to which the great hero belonged.
The fact that the king did not want the belt for himself, but because his daughter asked for it helped negotiations to proceed smoothly.
The queen and her people ultimately accepted it as “giving aid to a woman living in a far-away land.”
In the end, they came to the conclusion that forging a peaceful alliance with that great hero was worth more to the Amazon people than the war-belt.
Neither the queen nor her people would ever hide behind an army of men. They would not be afraid even to do battle with that great hero, but the queen was not so mad for battle that she would go to war without cause.
Given that the great hero was a man, they could not accept him as one of them, but by establishing a friendly rivalry between them, the queen hoped to cultivate a competitive spirit in her women and make them a stronger, more united people.
Although the queen allowed her emotions to drive her as she raced across the battlefield, she also made many such political decisions. For that reason, she was known to her people as a woman of two faces, but both of those faces commanded their respect.
They could not say whether her policy concerning the great hero and his men was realistic based on the social conditions of the time, or an impracticable pipe dream.
That was because it never bore fruit.
The relationship the queen had envisioned between her people and the great hero fell apart at the negotiation table just as she was about to hand over the belt.
Because the schemes of a goddess led . . . to the queen’s tragic death.
X X
Main Street, Snowfield
A massive horse dashed over the broken asphalt, weaving through the thick, jet-black mist.
There had been four horses at first, but one and then another had been consumed by the oncoming darkness until the hoofbeats of only one could still be heard.
Even with its fellows hidden from the world, the last gargantuan horse raced through the city night as the whim of the grotesque Heroic Spirit on its back—Alkeides—without the slightest trace of fear.
But even a Heroic Spirit as great as Alkeides had no choice but to flee.
The blackness came on.
The blackness came on.
An overwhelming cloud of blackness was hot on Alkeides’ heels, borne on the air the swayed with the leaves of the roadside trees, on the breeze that blew between the buildings, and even on the despairing sighs of those it had already consumed.
Alkeides carried within him warped, mud-like magical energy the color of destruction, but the shadow that pursued him embodied a different kind of darkness.
Alkeides had no way of knowing exactly what that “black mist” was.
Still, all his accumulated experience and the senses honed by the deadly combat he had just been engaged in told him that it was no ordinary being.
He could not know what became of those engulfed by the inky blackness, but he did notice one thing: The Spirit Origin of Kerberos, a part of his Noble Phantasm, had vanished from the area.
The magical energy that linked them was not completely gone, but he could neither recall it nor dismiss it.
It was as if a massive ward was slithering of its own accord in an effort to isolate him.
As the dark torrent, like the khamsin he had once seen in an arid region on the Mediterranean coast in life dyed black, rushed on behind him, his horse’s hooves at last outpaced the “black mist.”
There was no longer any obstacle in the way of his horse. His escape seemed simple.
That instant . . . the faint sound of something slicing the air reached Alkeides’ ears.
“. . . Here?” The bowman-turned-avenger muttered, a hint of a different emotion in his irritated voice.
“You would attack me in these circumstances? You are certainly fearless, queen.”
At the same time, he nocked an arrow to his bow and, still urging on his horse, twisted his upper body and loosed it.
There was a crash, and sparks shone in the night of Main Street.
A moment later, hoofbeats resounded through the gaps between buildings, weaving a tumultuous ensemble with those of Alkeides’ massive steed.
A single, swift horse appeared, displaying extraordinary movements. On its back rode a Heroic Spirit.
“. . . Alkeides!” The woman on the horse—the Rider-Class Heroic Spirit Hippolyte—shouted the moment they caught sight of each other. “How dare you! Are you planning to dishonor what those brave heroes achieved by using a curse to hold back the venom?!”
When he heard that, Alkeides flashed a fearless grin behind his cloth, even while he suppressed the hydra venom coursing through his veins with the power of the “mud” that had flowed into him through Bazdilot.
I see. That explains it.
The image of the police officers he had faced shortly before flashed through his mind.
Those humans, setting aside the one called John . . . They may have wielded Noble Phantasms, but I doubt many could have stood firm in the face of my strength.
His torrent of magical energy should have been enough to scatter a mob of police officers.
But they had remained on the battlefield and survived.
They had been consumed by the black mist, and he did not know what had happened to them after that, but they had been unnaturally resilient . . . Or rather, some outside force had unquestionably been enhancing their meagre strength.
“Queen.”
Alkeides’ doubts instantly came to a head as he urged on his horse with all his might, and he matter-of-factly stated his conclusion.
“You . . . gave them your protection, didn’t you?”
“. . .”
Hippolyte accelerated her horse and fired her next arrow in silence.
Alkeides deflected it with his bow. The deflected arrow flew forward and tore up a large chunk of asphalt.
The avenger’s massive steed, however, trampled the viscous obstacle as if it were not there and hurtled forward, always forward with all its might.
Alkeides flowed smoothly into a counterattack without stopping the scything motion of his bow.
He nocked three of his own arrows at once and fired them in unison with the acceleration of his horse.
The three arrows tore through the air, each tracing a different trajectory, closing in on Hippolyte from the front, back, and above.
Hippolyte, however, skillfully maneuvered her horse and rode it across the side of a building.
Running in such a way would normally, of course, be impossible.
Launching out of the posture of a mountain deer walking up the wall of a dam, the swift steed continued to practically glide through the urban landscape with the force of a falcon.
Horse and rider moved like a single creature—Hippolyte continued to use her bow without being shaken by her steed’s movements. Paired with their blinding speed, their movements could be mistaken for a centaur of legend.
The queen of the Amazons, sometimes called “the original equestrian tribe,” drew a pinnacle of horse-riding skill whose perfection belied her youthful appearance—or rather, which had been arrived at by a different path than “perfection” in the modern day—from the depths of her Spirit Origin as she sliced through the darkness of night accompanied by the neighing of her steed.
“I’m sure that some of those officials were men,” Alkeides probed the queen as his own horse rocked him.
“. . .”
“Has the radiance of the Grail and the logic of war led you to abandon your pride, queen of the Amazons?”
“. . . Silence.”
Neither of them allowed their offense or defense to slacken, even as they exchanged words.
“I don’t know what you would wish for . . . but would you really forsake your way of life for the wish-granting Grail?”
“I said silence!”
Hippolyte added emphasis in vexation. Alkeides showered her with quiet yet forceful words.
“Like you did when you betrayed us?” He asked, probing.
“. . .”
The queen’s response . . . was not an angry bellow but silence.
All expression vanished from Hippolyte’s eyes, which had been blazing with fury. Her mount was leaving the nighttime scenery behind it with the speed of the wind, but in her mind, time had stopped.
The face she exposed in the dark night was devoid of expression, or perhaps its expression had been blotted out by so many other emotions piled onto it like coals.
But that only lasted a moment.
Just the instant between her horse kicking the ground and its hooves striking it again.
After that brief blank in which the world seemed to have frozen, the look plastered on her face was . . . a fearless grin.
“Nonsense!”
She swiftly drew her own horse alongside Alkeides’ gargantuan steed and brandished a long spear materialized from the depths of her Spirit Origin.
“!”
“Were you trying to test me? Then you should have put more scorn in your words, Avenger.”
The spear was longer than its wielder Hippolyte was tall. She swung it at Alkeides, pressing him in an effort to take his life.
In a flash, her Noble Phantasm, the war god’s belt, was wrapped around her arm the held the spear, and a thrust cloaked in a divine aura shot out at Alkeides’ bow.
Alkeides countered by immediately activating the same Noble Phantasm—the war god’s belt—and parrying the thrust with his divine-aura-clad bow.
A limb of his mighty bow deflected the spearhead, and a loud crash echoed through the city night.
Scattered divinity tore through the surrounding darkness and slowed the pursuit of the “black mist.”
They clashed a second time, then a third, then their horses separated, and Hippolyte roared:
“You can’t seriously believe that I would fall for a taunt like that!”
Their voices sounded with strange force in each other’s ears despite the sounds of hoofbeats and flying arrows that filled the air.
They continued to launch attacks on each other as their horses crossed paths in three dimensions and the “black mist” closed in behind them with renewed vigor.
“You’re acting desperate, Alkeides!”
“Oh . . .?”
Hippolyte was firing her bow at the gaps in the Nemean lion’s pelt that protected him while occasionally switching to her spear and attacking his weapon directly.
It was a ceaseless rain of blows, perfectly in sink with the movements of her galloping horse.
She was struggling to bridge the gap in the magical energy contained in their Spirit Origins with skill, but Alkeides was worn down by consecutive battles and was in no condition to shake her off with brute force.
Beside which . . .
. . .
As he fended off the queen’s spear thrusts, Alkeides realized.
Her strength is growing.
The quantity and quality of her magical energy were clearly greater than they had been during their encounter in the ravine.
Has she been temporarily boosted using a Command Spell . . .?
No, this isn’t a momentary enhancement. The base of her Spirit Origin has been reinforced.
“I retract my insult, queen.”
“. . .”
“I imagined that your strategy was to provide your blessing to others while remaining hidden yourself and strike me while my guard was down . . . but you intend to tear through me head-on.”
“Of course I do,” the queen casually shot back from astride her horse, then bellowed: “Alkeides . . . you’re laboring under a misunderstanding.”
“Oh?”
“I have no intention of denying my sisters’ and my people’s beliefs, whatever they may be.” She built up power in the cloth wound around her right arm—the war god’s belt—she continued in a clear, ringing voice: “But you could never know why my people were born . . .!”
Her right arm glowed and the divine aura that filled her body swelled explosively.
She concentrated the greater part of that radiance into the spear in her right hand and channeled the remainder into her mount.
The queen and her prized steed had gone beyond unity of horse and rider and become one with her weapon as well. They formed a single arrowhead, driving a ferocious blow into Alkeides.
“Or what I truly wished for at the end of those lush, spirit-haunted plains!”
For an instant, the “black mist” hid them completely . . . then the loudest crash yet rang out and scattered it once again.
“. . . Well struck, queen.”
Once the black mist cleared, it revealed Alkeides atop his horse, with the spear thrust into his left arm.
“It seems you have found an excellent Master.”
“. . .”
“I can see that in this short time you have either grown far more accustomed to battle or received precise tuning. They must be impressive to enable you to draw out so much divine power in this world so far removed from the Age of Gods.”
His wound, however, was far from lethal. Despite the fact that the spearhead was still embedded between his bones, the dark red “mud” was already squirming out to fill the wound.
“. . . Alkeides . . . what are you carrying inside you?” Hippolyte asked, her face growing grim and her right hand still gripping her spear. “What is that ‘mud’?”
Because her spearhead was still stuck into Alkeides, they were naturally forced to continue riding in parallel. As Hippolyte, seeing the “mud” oozing from her opponent’s wound, hesitated to pull back her spear for a moment, the bow swung by Alkeides’ right hand bit into her side.
With a grunt, she hurriedly blocked it with divine energy from the belt, but the force of the blow pulled her spear free and put distance between the two horses again.
Alkeides checked that the mud had staunched his wound once the spear was removed, then casually declared:
“. . . Who can say? But given that it adapts to my current form . . . it’s probably part of a ‘human.’”
The next instant . . . a portion of the mud that had overflowed from his wound abruptly grew into a dark-red surge that launched itself at Hippolyte.
“In which case, demigod queen . . .”
“What . . .?!”
“Know that you cannot pierce the end of man with mere divine power.”
The “mud” the color of half-rotten blood and distinct from the “black mist” leapt to engulf Hippolyte like a mass of living slime.
She and her horse avoided it just in the nick of time.
But the “mud,” which seemed to have a will of its own, pursued Hippolyte, forming into an immense pair of viscous jaws to consume her in a single gulp.
“It will take more than that . . .!”
Hippolyte once again focused magical energy into the belt wrapped around her arm, preparing to draw it more divine energy . . . but as if in response, the mud suddenly burst apart.
“!”
It spread out like a spiderweb centered on a Main Street intersection, becoming a cloud of muddy fumes that threatened to envelope Hippolyte and her mount from all sides.
Faced with what looked like a forest of black trees closing in on her from every direction, Hippolyte, aware of the dangers, began to fuse her own Spirit Origin with the belt, when . . .
“With my Command Spell, I order you:”
“. . .! Master?!”
A voice sounded within Hippolyte, going beyond telepathy and speaking directly to the nature of her Spirit Origin.
“Draw the dragon from the leylines and release it with divine might!”
The next instant, magical energy welled up from her surroundings—from the sacred ground of Snowfield itself—and was drawn into Hippolyte’s Goddess of War.
Suddenly, a rainbow-colored radiance lit the darkness of night.
It was not only her Noble Phantasm.
The magical energy contained within the Heroic Spirit herself swelled explosively, and with an immense torrent of light with her at its center, she blasted away most of the oncoming “mud.”
When the blinding light subsided, and Hippolyte surveyed her surroundings . . . the “mud,” the “black mist,” and even Alkeides were nowhere to be seen.
Realizing that he had taken the opportunity to withdraw, Hippolyte gritted her teeth.
“Are you trying to say I’m not even worth settling things with . . .?!”
Once Hippolyte’s anger had subsided, she turned to the empty air and spoke. She was communicating telepathically with her Master.
“Master, one of your valuable Command Spells . . .” She began to protest but was unable to continue.
“. . . No. Thank you, Master. And I apologize. It seems I still wasn’t strong enough.”
The recoil she had suffered and the twisted magical energy of the “mud” that had almost flowed back on her the moment she had blown it away with her Command-Spell-boosted Spirit Origin had convinced her:
As things stood, I wouldn’t have been able to stop it.
She was able to surmise that it would have been impossible for her to completely shake off that “mud” mingled with Alkeides’ blood and an immense quantity of magical energy without the aid of a Command Spell.
And . . . if that “mud” had done anything to her, she was sure that it would have been dire.
She believed that her Master, observing her from a distance, had used the precious Command Spell to save her because her Master had taken it more seriously than she had.
Even if my Master used up all three Command Spells, I doubt I would ever want to rebel . . .
Hippolyte harbored no dislike for the being who was her Master.
There was points on which they disagreed, but her Master was worthy of riding alongside.
But for that very reason . . . she felt indebted to her Master for needing the help of a Command Spell in a battle with an opponent tied to herself.
“. . .”
The cityscape after Alkeides had departed and the black mist had rolled back.
Hippolyte stroked her horse’s neck as she surveyed her surroundings.
She had already left Main Street and put a considerable distance between herself and the hospital from which the “black mist” had burst.
As the sky began to lighten, she sensed the townspeople who had been kept away beginning to stir near the hospital.
“In any case, I can’t keep fighting like this. Let’s start over, Master,” Hippolyte telepathically announced and remounted her horse.
“You ran well, Kalion. Let’s rest with Master.”
Hippolyte called her horse’s name with a peaceful expression, then dematerialized and slowly set off back to the stronghold where her Master was, taking out-of-the-way side streets.
The retreating figures of the girl and horse were seen by several people before they dematerialized, but because casinos and other businesses occasionally employed horses for publicity, no one paid them much mind. They assumed that Hippolyte’s clothes must also be promotion for some event and continued on their ways.
The people of Snowfield could no longer afford to waste energy on such minor oddities.
People who were supposed to have left the city inexplicably returned saying that they “did not want to leave.”
A mysterious disease was running rampant among animals.
Terrorists had attacked the police station.
Then there was the gas pipeline explosion in the desert, the damage caused to the city by a freak windstorm, and the fire in the factory district.
It was one disaster after another, and everyone who checked the news or the weather all suspected the same thing: that the enormous hurricane that had the western United States in an uproar, which had formed without warning and was supposed to be heading straight for their region of the country, would make a beeline for Snowfield.
That all of this could not be coincidence. That something was happening in their city.
They had no proof.
If they wrote about it online, the responses from people in other areas were full of comments like, “Talk about bad luck,” and “You guys must be cursed.”
The fact that there had been few deaths was part of the reason, as were the efforts of a government agency to conceal any eye-catching damages, but unease was still growing among Snowfield’s residents.
Still, the situation had not deteriorated to the point of panic and rioting.
The countless suggestions and wards built into the city at its inception restrained such impulses.
Even so . . . they were approaching their limit.
The faces of those who sensed how bad their situation had become were beginning to show signs not of resistance but of resignation.
They had no idea what was going to happen.
The unease just swirled in the depths of their intuitions.
A feeling that the town called Snowfield would soon be coming to an end.
And that their lives and those of everyone else would be dragged into it.
X X
In the Sky
A massive airship flew, through the power of magecraft, at a normally unattainable altitude.
Inside the blimp, which doubled as the workshop of Francesca—a mage who was among the masterminds of the “Fake Holy Grail War” in Snowfield—the mage girl observed events on the ground below alongside Francois Prelati, the Caster she had summoned.
Francesca had been using Francois’ Illusion Skill to deceive spatial distance and observe the battle in front of the hospital as if it were unfolding right in front of her without relying on familiars. However . . .
“That’s weird . . .”
“What’s wrong?” Caster asked, stuffing his face with pumpkin pie.
“There’s a lot of funny stuff going on,” his Master, Francesca, answered with an air of confusion. “I’m mean, I’m happy that unforeseen things are happening, but not knowing the answers makes my head feel all fuzzy, you know?”
“You sure are selfish. Just what I’d expect from me.” Caster—Prelati—replied with a raucous laugh. Francesca ignored him and continued to think out loud.
“The Amazon queen’s Spirit Origin is higher quality than it was when I saw her in the ravine. Her fortune’s about the same, but her physical abilities and her inner magical energy maybe have gone up by maybe a full rank.”
“Wow, that can happen? I never expected to see a Servant grow during the War.”
“It can, if they get a boost from an injection of magical energy. . . . Do you think her Master, little Doris, has finally taken reinforcement magecraft into forbidden territory? Maybe putting her lifespan and even her Crest on the line to enhance her own Magic Circuits by force . . .?”
“Whoa. That queen’s master is on ‘our side,’ right? She should know that the grail’s a warped fake. She’d have to be crazy to still risk her life for it.”
Prelati seemed to have taken an interest, because he wiped the pumpkin cream from around his mouth with a handkerchief and turned to look at Francesca.
“Well, we won’t get to find out if it can approach the Third Magic or not until all’s said and done . . . but considering how much magical energy is involved, it should be able to grant some pretty high-quality wishes.”
“Oh, who cares! It’s more fun if they really struggle instead of going down easily, anyway! I mean, we’ve got a real upset on our hands, with a top-contender like Gilgamesh going down!” Francesca suddenly decided to accept the situation and burst out laughing.
“Anyway,” Prelati asked her, “I’m more interested in that black mist that came out of the hospital. What was that?”
“Who knows?”
“’Who knows’? . . . That stuff’s not normal. Should we do something?”
“What would you do in my shoes? Panic and cry that you’re confused and scared?”
“. . . Well, if I didn’t know, I guessed I’d say, ‘Who knows?’ But seeing a gender-swapped me crying her eyes out might be surprisingly hot, so why not give it a try?”
“I completely agree, but it’d be a pain, so only if I feel like it. Right now, I’ve got no clue what’s going to happen, and I want to enjoy it to the max!”
She brushed off Prelati and went on wondering aloud.
“Still . . . little Tsubaki ending up as a Master was a funny accident, but I’d like to know what kind of Heroic Spirit she summoned. I mean, it seems like it whisked a bunch of people off to who-knows-where, you know?
“And that girl . . . Haruri, right? My organs ached with joy when she summoned a monster, but she wasn’t very exciting today, was she?
“I mean, it’s no fun having people do whatever they feel like where I can’t see them.”
At that point, Francesca narrowed her eyes, and her smile took on a wicked air as she muttered:
“And that bloodsucker coming and going as he pleases is just a little . . . unpleasant, don’t you think?”
X X
In a Dream
“It looks like quite a lot have been drawn into ‘this world.’ . . . I wonder what will happen now.”
The hematophage in the shape of a young boy—Jester Karture, the mage who was technically Assassin’s Master—used his power to switch his power to switch his body to his boy form and gloated over the city from atop a building.
“If Miss Assassin sides with this world, she’ll make enemies of the police. Not that they were friendly to begin with,” Jester muttered to himself, chuckling.
“If she sides against this world, she’ll have to kill little Tsubaki, who she fought so hard to protect. Yes, it won’t hurt me, whichever way it goes.
“This is a Holy Grail War,” Jester continued with a wicked grin at odds with his youthful appearance. “Everyone around you is an enemy. Everyone.”
Soon, a hint of ecstasy crept into his smile, and he spread his arms wide in ecstasy.
Jester continued to express his own joy in the world, as if trying to take the blue sky, in which the sun had fully risen, on himself.
“Only I . . . Only I, your Master, can be your ally . . . Miss Assassin.”
And so, Jester was drunk on his own ecstasy . . . but he was overlooking something—a single “abnormality” that had occurred in that world.
Not even Tsubaki’s Servant, Pale Rider, had noticed it.
Beneath the Kuruokas’ residence, something else was being born.
Beneath the house, a mage’s workshop, larger than the basement, had been constructed.
Around a certain “catalyst” that had been carefully preserved in its center, an abnormality was manifesting.
“. . .”
Perhaps it ought to be called an apparition.
At the very least, it was no one’s Servant.
“. . . Why?”
It was a being that might have become one, but no magical energy linked it to anyone.
It had probably risen in response to some influence and would soon disappear. “It” was cloaked in a red garment causing quivering water droplets to drift about it.
“Why am I here . . .”
It had clean-cut features and a strange, androgynous figure . . . but it did nothing in particular. It only wavered in that spot.
“. . . Zheng?”
For the moment.
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Originally Posted by Arashi_Leonhart
