Chapter CLII: A Thorny Path

The station should have looked much the same as all of the others, different maybe in degrees or in the exact aesthetics, but largely the same in structure. Stairs leading up and out onto the streets above, a platform for people to stand and wait on for their train to arrive, and a track that passed through, disappearing down tunnels that led in opposite directions.

Those features weren’t entirely gone, but they had been taken over. The linoleum tiles had cracked and broken, pushed out of the way. Wooden paneling lay, splintered and shattered, where it had been pried away from its mounting. The exterior walls themselves were crumbling and unstable, as though there was only one thing holding them in place and it wasn’t brick or mortar.

What had caused all of this damage wasn’t some sort of fight that might have taken place down here, and it wasn’t because something that was simply too big had squeezed its way through or because something with too much weight or strength had carelessly stampeded through. No, the source was instead a thick forest of branches, a winding, twisting grove of gnarled brown wood and long, wickedly sharp thorns. They punched clean through every surface, sprouting from stone and brick and wood alike, curling out and around the edges of the tunnel with a deceptively affectionate embrace. Each was at least as thick around as my arm and often thicker, undulating, curving, and twining together as though they had been woven that way by some sort of forest god.

I’d heard of this sort of thing before, about how powerful nature was, that tree roots could grow so insistently and so ponderously that they could punch through brick walls and bore through cement, given enough time. Buildings could be compromised by stuff like that, with load-bearing walls cracking and breaking as the roots of a nearby tree worked their way through.

But this? This would have been dozens, hundreds of trees, such was the number of branches. There were so many that the tunnel was more bramble and branch than stone, with only a narrow pathway on the floor clear enough to permit passage. Even then, the thorns were so large and so sharp that a single moment of carelessness could see one carving through you, and if you fell on one, you might be lucky to walk away at all, let alone without suffering some major, debilitating wound. They were like knives, jutting out several inches and ending in a tip so thin I wouldn’t have been surprised if they could even get through armor.

All of a sudden, I wanted the rest of my costume. Those points were thin enough that they might manage to make it through even the tightly knitted weave of my spider silk bodysuit, but it would be better protection than our current mystic codes were.

“Branches?” Ritsuka murmured incredulously.

“What the hell?” said Rika. “What kind of fairy tale bullshit is this?”

A very good question. We hadn’t ever ruled out the possibility of Charles Perrault having been summoned, except that the masterminds were P, B, and M, and we had already met and defeated both P and B: Paracelsus von Hohenheim and Charles Babbage. The only one left should be M.

Of course, they’d also had Robin Hood on their side, if only for a short while, and Mephistopheles. There was nothing to say they couldn’t have other subordinate Servants hanging around, but that ran into the question of how they could support so many Servants and power their Angrboða machine at the same time with a single Holy Grail. The Grails had a lot of power, but they also still had limits.

“Romulus…did something like this, too, didn’t he?” Mash pointed out.

It was a good counterpoint. Rika’s comment had made me jump straight to Perrault, but simply because Perrault seemed the most obvious didn’t mean it was automatically him. It didn’t even need to be a Caster of any kind, not when Romulus had a Noble Phantasm that made a whole tree grow from nothing. It was just more likely to be a Caster than not.

“Uhn.” Fran stepped forward and reached out with one hand, as though to touch one of the enormous thorns.

My own hand snapped out and grabbed her wrist before she could even dare.

“Don’t,” I warned her firmly. “It’s definitely possible that the thorns will curse you if you prick your finger on them, and they might even be cursed to make you more likely to prick your finger, too. Don’t chance it.”

Chastened, Fran pulled her hand back towards her body and eyed the thorns with a new — and very healthy, if you asked me — dose of suspicion.

“Oh no,” Rika moaned. She pressed her hands to her cheeks like she was trying to hide behind them. “Please, please, please don’t tell me the Servant behind this is Walt Disney! My childhood won’t be able to survive it!”

That was another possibility. But, “I doubt it.”

Rika let out a groan of relief.

“We should be careful anyway, right, Senpai?” said Ritsuka. “We’re… Are we still going to investigate this tunnel?”

He looked down the crowded tunnel, made tighter and less accommodating by the brambles and thorns that twisted and twined across almost every available surface, and cast a doubtful gaze on the treacherous path that led through them. Yeah, I wasn’t really jumping for joy at the thought of that either.

Unfortunately, there was just one problem.

“Right now, this is the only lead we have. None of the other lines had anything like this in the tunnels.”

And that made this particular tunnel all the more suspicious. After all, what purpose was there in having this mess of branches with thorns long and sharp enough to skewer a lion if you weren’t protecting the location of your main base? Especially when the other lines hadn’t had anything other than a token patrol force.

It wasn’t impossible that this was a red herring. But it would have required so much time and effort that I had a hard time imagining someone would waste it all on a show piece meant only as a distraction.

“I knew she was going to say that!” Rika lamented. She jabbed a finger at me sourly. “Listen, Senpai! I’m never gonna forgive you if this turns out to be some plot by Walt Disney, I really won’t!”

I really didn’t think it was going to be Walt Disney — Perrault was just way more likely — but now that she’d been so insistent on it, a niggling doubt was festering.

Fuck. Could it be Disney?

“The fuck is Walt Disney?” Jeanne Alter asked.

Rika whirled about towards her, horrified. “Oh my god,” she whispered, “we never showed you…! When we get back, we have to have a movie marathon! The entire Disney Renaissance, back to back to back!”

Mordred snorted.

“You know, Master, now I’m not sure I want to,” Jeanne Alter said sardonically.

Rika gave a theatrical gasp. “Don’t say that!”

“Enough goofing off,” I said, and the mood sobered almost immediately. “We don’t have too much longer before the fog starts to roll back in, and if it really does make it down here, it’s going to be all that much harder to see what we’re doing and where we’re going. We need to get as far as we can before then.”

Jeanne Alter eyed the nearest twisting weave of branches. “Sure you don’t want me to just burn it all down? Would solve our problems there pretty quick, don’t you think?”

Some of them, but not all of them.

“Not without choking us all in smoke and reducing our visibility even more. We also don’t want M and his cronies finding out we’re coming when their defenses are burned down right in front of them.”

“Tch.” Jeanne Alter scoffed. “Yeah, whatever. Let’s just get going then.”

It took a lot of care to maneuver around the brambles and branches, doing our best to avoid the reach of the thorns, and that extra caution made us slower than we had yet been the entire day. Every footstep had to be measured and observed to ensure the floor was clear enough to walk upon, every inch forward meticulous and purposeful. It was not enough to simply watch for the presence of an enemy waiting up ahead or far behind, we had to make absolutely sure that no one misstepped or tripped, that no one fell and hurt themselves on the wicked thorns.

Just getting across the platform and down onto the tracks was a challenge. With at least half of the lamps destroyed by the encroaching foliage, most of the light we had came from our flashlights, and those were focused beams. They did not and could not light up a whole room, just because they weren’t designed like that.

Once we did manage to safely climb down onto the tracks, it meant that we had to walk in a narrower column, too. The very center of the railway seemed clearer than the rest of it, thankfully, but that wasn’t the same thing as being completely clear and it didn’t mean that the rest of the railway was anywhere near as clear.

Morbid curiosity had driven me to look up some of those “life after people” videos — it had seemed relevant back when I was fighting an apocalypse whose shape and scope I knew nothing about — and this…didn’t quite look like that. Not enough greenery down here, not enough fauna making it home, and not enough water built up in the deeper parts. But it looked fairly close.

Eventually, after far more time and effort than I would have liked, we managed to start down the tunnel heading east, following along towards where the Ley Line Terminal would be at its strongest, closer to the center. Flamel, near the back of the line, chose to reach out and lay a hand upon one of the branches before I could do anything to stop him, and I turned abruptly.

“Caster?”

The rest of the group stopped with me. Flamel didn’t answer for a few seconds, and then pulled his hand away.

“Merely investigating the structure of these branches,” he explained shortly. “I imagine you needn’t have me tell you, but they’re not natural constructs. Whoever created these forged them out of magical energy, not unlike, I imagine, how Charles Babbage created his Helter Skelter.”

“You saying they’re not real, Gramps?” Mordred asked.

“Essentially, yes,” he replied. “They are, to be more specific, not natural fauna whose growth has been controlled and accelerated through alchemy, nor any kind of magical plant I have ever had the pleasure of examining. They are more akin to projections. They have the same consistency, texture, and structure as natural vines, but they are made entirely of ether. Were you to chop them up or otherwise disrupt their structure, the disconnected components would eventually disappear.”

So one way or another, they were the creation of someone’s Noble Phantasm. I didn’t think, however, that his comparison was quite right. The Helter Skelter had been built using Babbage’s Noble Phantasm, not summoned into existence by it. If this was at all what I thought it was belonging to who I thought it belonged to, then it would be more like the Jabberwocky, wouldn’t it?

In that case, could we even do appreciable damage to it at all? Or would it just regenerate, even if we hacked it to bits?

Jeanne Alter’s mouth pulled into a grin. “Does that mean it’s safe to burn it all up after all?”

“No,” I said firmly before Flamel could give an answer. “We don’t know that it can’t just repair itself, so all you might wind up doing is wasting time and energy and filling up the tunnel with smoke.”

Jeanne Alter’s expression could only be called a pout.

“Guess chopping it up won’t do any good either,” Mordred commented, eyeing a particularly thorny branch. “Damn. Fucking sucks. Couldn’t have made things easier on us, huh?”

“Given the amount of magical energy that must have gone into their manifestation, I believe it would be a good bet to say that these branches are indeed self-repairing,” said Flamel. “Anything which we might attempt to do to them will be reversed in short order.”

Emiya huffed a short chuckle. “I suppose that’s to be expected, isn’t it?”

“Can M and his allies sense our location through them?” I asked what I felt was the most important question.

Flamel frowned. “It is difficult to say. It is not impossible, but on the whole, I find it somewhat less likely. I can say, at the very least, that they do not drain magical energy from any who come into contact with them, nor do they seem to be cursed.”

I guess that was the best I was going to get.

“All the more reason to avoid them as best we can.”

Because even if they weren’t any more dangerous than what they looked like, getting stabbed through by one of those thorns still wouldn’t be pleasant. For anyone.

Flamel inclined his head. “As you say.”

We continued on, trudging down the tunnel and doing our best to keep every part of our bodies as far away from the thorns as possible. It didn’t get any easier as we went, but fortunately, it also didn’t really get any harder. Where the branches poked up through the floor seemed entirely random, but beyond that, they didn’t get denser and harder to avoid the further we went.

That had its own downsides, of course, because that meant that we didn’t really have any indicators to tell us that there might have been a secret base hidden behind that particular gnarl of branches or that this one was guarding a hole in the wall. With the branches themselves causing so much damage bursting through the tunnel’s structure, we couldn’t even use the damage as a clue for where the secret lair might be, because it was just spread out that much.

That might have been half the point. Double up not only protecting your hidden base, but also disguising the entrance in a way that was difficult to distinguish from the rest of the tunnel.

Even my bugs were having trouble. They could circle the branches just fine without any issue, but when I had some try to squeeze into the break in the walls and follow the branches back to their source, they ran into something that stopped them. Not a physical thing, like concrete or bedrock or whatever the tunnel might have been dug through, but a kind of invisible barrier that blocked their way.

“There’s something else,” I announced.

I got glances and looks from just about everyone, but since I didn’t stop walking, no one else did either.

“Senpai?” Ritsuka asked curiously.

“Are we…not alone down here?” Rika asked next in a hushed fake whisper.

I was a little annoyed, doubly so when I realized that you could technically say there were a bunch of ghosts with us.

“Wherever these branches come from, they’re forming some kind of bounded field or barrier,” I answered. “I can’t get any bugs past them and into the walls to follow them back to their source.”

Flamel hummed. “If there is a bounded field, it is not directly affecting the tunnel itself, although… Perhaps it is an effect of the vines themselves? Whatever Noble Phantasm constructed them might perhaps have imbued them with some sort of effect to ward off intruders.”

He was probably right about that. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more that started to make sense, because hadn’t there been something in one of Perrault’s fairy tales about something very similar?

“Where’s Lord Hashirama when you need him?” Rika muttered. Her brother rolled his eyes.

“It may also be that the vines themselves form the boundary for a bounded field that isolates the tunnel itself from other points of connection,” Flamel went on. “That is to say, it may be that we could search this tunnel for a century and never find M’s secret lair because the bounded field formed by the vines disconnects the entrance from the tunnel itself until the moment M needs to enter or leave.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“So we could be wasting our time down here looking for something we’ll never find,” Mordred clarified.

“Yes,” was Flamel’s blunt answer.

That…was actually a much less comfortable possibility, and yet one that I had to admit was very much plausible. If M really was Moriarty, then I didn’t see how he could manage a bit of magecraft quite so high level or intricate, but not only was that another way for the forest from The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood to be interpreted, if M was some other kind of Caster who really could perform what Frankenstein had called “spells beyond human wisdom,” then he could specialize in anything at all, including such a powerful and intricate bounded field.

In fact, an expert at botanical magecraft — much as I struggled to think of any that would qualify as a Heroic Spirit, outside of a druid — would mean there was no need to think Perrault was present at all, and in some ways, that was scarier. It was one thing when we were looking at the effects of a Noble Phantasm that might have to play by the rules of the fairy tale it came from, another when it was all a series of carefully crafted spells that didn’t have any such rules dictating their limits.

“Let’s hope you’re wrong,” I said. I was talking as much about his theory as I was mine.

“Ah, yes, of course, it would be better if I was,” he said, backtracking. “I was merely hypothesizing, and that was one of the possibilities that I thought provided a plausible answer for our current predicament.”

“So what I’m hearing is that we should burn this shit down,” said Jeanne Alter.

Flamel shook his head. “Again, I’m afraid that would be an ineffective tactic. For that matter, your flames might not be capable of inflicting any appreciable damage to these vines at all, let alone something permanent or debilitating.”

She leered back at him. “What, you scared to try?”

“Terrified!” Flamel said with a lopsided smile. “The amount of magical energy necessary to form these vines across this entire tunnel is frightening, and the only idea more frightening is what might happen were you to attempt to burn them away. If there was a reaction and I wasn’t fast enough to stop it, a large portion of London might go up in the aftermath — taking us with it.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Y-yeah, um, let’s…not do that,” Ritsuka said. “I…kind of like living, you know?”

Mordred huffed a short chuckle. “If it was just me, I might’ve said just to do it. I’m a Servant, so who gives a fuck if I gotta die to take out the enemy, right?” She glanced back at us Masters. “But you Chaldea folk still got more work to do after this, don’tcha? Can’t go blowing you lot up into the sky, now can we?”

“I didn’t bring my jetpack,” Rika confirmed.

“Don’t have a damn clue what that is!” Mordred replied brightly.

I refrained from commenting. Rika didn’t know it, but if Da Vinci had made our current mystic codes and their “cushion” functions using what I was pretty sure she had, then she was technically wearing a part of my own flight pack. So in a way, she had indeed brought her jetpack.

Unfortunately, Flamel’s theory appeared to bear out the longer we walked. With the pace we had to take, I had plenty of time to squish my bugs into as many crevices and cracks as I could find, and the same thing greeted me each time: an impassable wall that blocked them from going any further than maybe an inch into the walls. Every part of the tunnel beyond the tunnel itself was inaccessible to me, and to some extent, I was starting to worry.

If the only entrance to M’s base was down here in this tunnel but the only way to reach it was to wait until he came out himself, then what were we supposed to do? We could set up an ambush or something, sure, but we had no idea if or when he would ever have to leave, because as a Servant, he didn’t need to worry about logistics like food or water. As long as he had the Grail, he could sit and wait us out.

The one thing I could cling to was Angrboða. His steam machine had to have an outlet somewhere in order to release the fog out into the city, and wherever that outlet was, it would at least be some kind of lead on the location of this secret base.

My alarm suddenly went off, announcing the schedule of the fog rolling in. I reached over to the metal band of my communicator to turn it off — and I’d barely done so before streams of white mist began jetting out of the walls.

“The fog!” Mash shouted, alarmed. “Miss Taylor!”

But I was already scrambling for my mask, holding my breath as I jammed it on. My glasses came off and fell somewhere to the tinkle of what might have been breaking glass, but I was far more concerned with getting my mask in place and making sure it was on correctly at that moment, so I couldn’t give it the attention it would have needed otherwise.

Thankfully, time hadn’t dulled the practiced motions much, so by the time my lungs started to burn for fresh air, it was safe for me to breathe in. The filter in my mask took care of the toxins in the fog and all I got was sweet oxygen.

My bugs weren’t as lucky. They were dying en masse, overloaded by the dense energy in the mist when the poison wasn’t enough to do them in on its own.

“There are vents in the walls!” Emiya announced.

“I-is that a normal part of the tunnel construction?” Mash asked.

I didn’t really know. I wanted to say there must have been something in the walls and the floor to drain things like water in the case of flooding or circulate the air, but I’d never had to really think of it before, so I couldn’t say.

“Whether it is or not, it is apparent that this is how M and his co-conspirators have been delivering the fog throughout the city,” Flamel said as he bent down. He straightened back up a moment later. “It is likely that our ultimate enemy had Professor Babbage connect all of the vents throughout the city to a single network and has been using it to pump the mist to every section at once, or at least every section in this part of London.” There was a brief flash of red light, and then he handed me my perfectly intact glasses, adding, “Your glasses, my dear girl.”

I took them from him and folded them up, placing them in the safety of my utility pouch.

“Thanks.”

“It was no trouble.”

“When we first arrived, the mist came from the western part of the city moving east,” a new voice said, and Arash materialized at the back of the group.

“Arash!” Mash, Ritsuka, and Rika all exclaimed.

“Oh,” said Mordred. “It’s just you. Geez. A little warning next time, yeah?”

“I thought there was a rule about that or whatever,” Jeanne Alter agreed snidely.

“Sorry about that,” Arash apologized. “I brought someone else with me, too.”

A tug on my shirt pulled my attention down, and I met Jackie’s big, green eyes.

“We saw the mist,” she said. “Is Mommy okay?”

I set my hand on her head reassuringly, since she couldn’t see my smile. “I’m fine, Jackie. The mask Da Vinci gave me is working perfectly.”

Tohsaka and Alice? I asked Arash.

Safely back at the apartment, he replied. I didn’t leave until I was sure they were inside and uninjured.

I gave him the smallest of nods. Good.

“It might look super creepy, but I’m not gonna lie, I’m super jealous,” said Rika. She pinched her nose shut, grimacing. “This stuff still smells super disgusting.”

“Hopefully, this is the last day we’ll have to put up with it,” her brother said, but he didn’t sound all that hopeful.

I guess he’s not going to be holding his breath, I thought, and then was immediately glad that my mask could hide my grimace, because that was terrible. It seemed Rika really was rubbing off on me.

“It’s already killed the bugs I managed to bring with me,” I told them all. I swung my arm around, shining my communicator’s flashlight across the breadth of the tunnel. “Even if I could have found the vents before — and I wasn’t having any luck with that — I can’t anymore.”

“Giving more credence to my theory about the nature of these vines,” Flamel said grimly.

“That’s what it looks like, yes.”

And I hated it. Because things would get a lot harder and a lot more inconvenient if it was true.

“So what does that mean for us?” Ritsuka asked.

As much as I hated to admit it, I wasn’t quite sure. If we had any idea of where M’s secret base was… Without so much as a general direction, however? Then even if we started doing the dangerous and desperate stuff like having Mordred and Emiya fire off Noble Phantasms indiscriminately, we’d have to destroy half the city just to have a chance of maybe hitting him. Maybe, because half a degree off on any axis could see us missing him entirely.

And if that failed, we would have exhausted two of our heaviest hitters and left ourselves open to counterattack. Or M could just sit back and leave us to spend hours or days sorting through the rubble for a Grail that wasn’t there, hoping that we could find it before he could finish whatever he was planning.

“We keep going,” I said for lack of anything better. “We check the densest point of the Ley Line Terminal, and then we continue down to the station we were going to leave from to begin with.” I looked over my shoulder at Flamel, “Caster, are we close enough now that you could track the energy in the fog to its source?”

Flamel’s lips drew into a thin line. “I…perhaps. I can at least make the attempt. Yes, this early in its deployment and this close to its point of origin, I do believe I could determine the general direction from which it came.”

I nodded. “Then we’ll leave that to you.”

“No pressure!” Rika added.

With our only lead further on, we had to keep going, so we did, now with Arash and Jackie in tow. They caught on without us needing to explain to avoid the thorns, maybe because they’d seen us doing it while they were catching up and figured it out on their own. The addition of two new people, however, didn’t do us any favors in speed, and so, between all of the other factors we were already having to work around, a journey that would have taken us half the time or less on any of the other lines wound up taking way longer than it should have.

By the time we’d reached the point on the Central Line closest to the Association’s enormous ley line, we’d spent the better part of half an hour just getting there.

“This is it,” I announced when we reached it. “Anyone seeing anything?”

Flashlights swung around, casting beams of focused light across every section of the tunnel, from the floor to the walls to the ceiling, and after the initial casual look showed nothing of interest, a series of slower, more careful inspections followed. Not only us Masters and Mash, but also the Servants, particularly the Archers with their eagle-eyed vision, scoured the entire section for any hints, clues, or signs of something out of place.

The branches didn’t make anything easier. Under the harsh light of our flashlights, they cast deep, dark shadows, sharp lines that cut the light from the dark like a blade. A softer, more diffuse lighting would have been better, something more like the gas lamps back at the platform or more modern fluorescent lights, but even if I’d been confident enough in my runes to attempt it, the only place to carve them was the branches. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to risk that.

“I don’t see anything,” Ritsuka announced.

“Uhn,” Fran agreed.

Rika shook her head. “Nada. This guy could’ve at least done us the favor of putting up a sign or something, you know, like, ‘bad guy lair ahead’ or something.”

“Just like Sir Mordred said earlier,” Mash said with a sigh.

“Woulda made it a helluva lot easier,” Mordred grunted. “Can’t see shit in this place.”

“Be a whole lot easier to see down here if all these branches were on fire,” Jeanne Alter suggested bluntly.

“No,” half a dozen different people said at once in just as many tones.

“I don’t taste good extra crispy!” Rika added.

“Alright, alright,” Jeanne Alter grumbled. “Killjoys, the whole lot of you.”

“Not sure any extra light would help all that much,” Arash remarked. “If there’s some kind of secret entrance hidden here, then it’s hidden well enough that I can’t find any sign of it. You, Emiya?”

“Much as I hate to admit it, I can’t claim any better,” said Emiya sourly. “If there is some kind of entrance to a secret base here, then it’s hidden so well that it’s indistinguishable from the tunnel, just as you said.”

“Caster?” I asked Flamel. “Had any luck?”

“Some,” he said, “but not as much as we would have liked. I’ve been following the flow of magical energy as we go, and as you might imagine, it’s becoming somewhat harder as the fog gets thicker. I can say,” he added, “that this general area is…not quite correct, but not wrong either. Wherever our elusive M has situated himself, it is fairly nearby, and so there should be some sign of his location nearby as well. Unfortunately…”

“If it’s here, it’s hidden behind the branches,” I concluded, and so thoroughly that even the best two pairs of eyes on the team couldn’t find it.

He nodded. “Yes.”

Fuck. That was the very last thing I wanted to hear, right now.

“We’ll mark this spot on the map.” I hated having to say it even as the words left my mouth. “We’ll check and see if the branches continue on as far as the St. Paul’s station, and then figure out a plan of action before we come back this way.”

Because even if M was somehow hiding the way in, I was as sure as I could be that it was here somewhere. Knowing how far these branches reached, however, would still tell us something about our enemy, because it boggled the mind to imagine that even a particularly powerful Caster could have such enormous reach without having support from the Grail.

“We could try cutting it,” Jackie offered. “Our knives are very sharp, Mommy.”

“If we try that, Mordred will be the one chopping,” I told her. “She has magic resistance, so if something goes wrong, she doesn’t have to worry about being hurt.”

“Ha!” Mordred barked a short laugh. “That all I’m good for, these days? Taking hits that’d lay someone else out?”

“Maybe if you weren’t so good at it, British,” Jeanne Alter shot back.

Mordred grinned. “Guess that just means I’m a better hero than the rest of you!”

“You’re a better something, that’s for sure.”

“Oh my god, just kiss already!” Rika cried. “Get it over with!”

The reaction, of course, was predictable —

“What the fuck did you just say?”

“With her? No way!”

“You know,” Emiya said contemplatively, “now that you mention it, Master…”

Both Mordred and Jeanne Alter whirled about to face him, and together, they demanded, “You tryna pick a fight, you bastard!?”

And when they realized what they’d done, they turned to each other, surprised, and their cheeks flushed red. Rather than keep fighting, they deliberately turned away from each other and tried to pretend nothing had happened.

The round of quiet chuckles was likewise ignored, as though refusing to acknowledge them would somehow erase the whole incident from everyone’s memories.

Unfortunately, the rest of the tunnel was much like all the sections that came before it. The branches didn’t thin out as we went, but the fog did, at least a little. The further we got from that central point so close to the British Museum and its Ley Line Terminal, the thinner the mist got, although it was rapidly thickening as it chased us back east. Like Arash said, it was just like it was when we first Rayshifted into this Singularity, starting in the west and moving eastward throughout the city.

If we had set up our own base in Buckingham, I imagine it would have rolled in from the north.

It convinced me all the more that M was hiding out somewhere near there. The only trick was figuring out exactly where, and with the branches in the way, we didn’t have much in the way of options on that front. If they really did disconnect the entrance to M’s base from the tunnel itself until he had a reason to leave it, then the only thing we could really do was get rid of the branches.

Hours seemed to pass before we finally came upon the St. Paul’s station, that was how much the combination of the branches and the fog slowed us, and it was much the same as the last one: overgrown with branches that jutted out of nearly every surface, creating a veritable jungle for us to cross. The signs, the bricks, the floors, they were all ruined and wrecked with twisting brown brambles jutting out of them and crossing over each other in chaotic tangles. Down the other end of the tunnel, they continued on into the darkness, far enough at least that the light of my flashlight couldn’t reach the end of them.

Whoever this Caster was, I had to hope that he was a pushover in direct combat, because if his offense was as good as his defense, then he might be a lot more trouble to deal with than anyone since Herakles and Caenis.

Just getting up onto the platform safely turned into something of an adventure, and there was no way for us to do it except for one at a time. Our Servants, at least, could give us a literal helping hand, since they could just jump or even turn into spirit form instead of physically pulling themselves up, but we had to take even more care climbing up here than we had getting down on our way in.

After spending so long taking so much care and having to watch for the branches and thorns, it was a relief to climb the stairs of the station and walk out back onto the streets. It was marred, of course, by the fog, but there wasn’t much of anything we could do about that, and the only solution would see the whole situation solved anyway.

“Never thought I’d be relieved to see the foggy streets again,” Emiya remarked.

“Right?” Rika agreed.

Arash hummed. “Have to admit, it’s a bit of a relief after crawling through all of those branches.”

Mordred snorted. “Doesn’t change our problems, though. How are we gonna take out that M bastard if we can’t even get to him?”

“It’s becoming more diffuse as it spreads, but the flow of magical energy in the fog only led one way while we were down there,” said Flamel. “I do believe we had the correct location, so at this point, it may only be a matter of…smoking him out, so to speak.”

A slow grin began to grow on Jeanne Alter’s face.

“Do you have any ideas how to go about doing that?” I asked him.

“None, I’m afraid, that would be easy to enact,” he answered apologetically. He stroked his beard in thought. “If we knew where, specifically, the location of the entrance was, then perhaps… With so much material to work with, however, the effort required would be prohibitive. Even were we to forge a contract right here and now,” he added for good measure, as though predicting my thoughts, “the strain supporting such an endeavor would put on all of you would make engaging M afterwards a difficult proposition.”

“You did a lot of really incredible stuff at the museum, though,” said Ritsuka. “Wasn’t all of that pretty costly, too?”

Flamel shook his head.

“Simple shape transformation is not nearly as difficult as it may have seemed on the outside,” he said. “In fact, the most draining thing I have yet done since my summoning was the creation of the diorama you saw in the study. For that matter, against Paracelsus, I was working with ordinary stone and glass, whereas these vines are likely the manifestation of a Noble Phantasm. It is far harder for me to attempt inserting my own mana into someone else’s spell and twist it to my liking than it is to work that ordinary stone into a spear or a statue.”

“Like trying to change the path of a river with a rock,” Mash muttered.

Flamel nodded. “Just so. With enough rocks, I might forge a dam. Unfortunately…”

You needed too many rocks for a single person to find the effort worth it.

“Fuck,” Mordred grunted.

“Uhn,” Fran agreed.

“So what I’m hearing here is,” Jeanne Alter began, “the only thing we can do is burn it all down.”

Flamel grimaced, but didn’t deny the point.

“If we set up a bounded field around the point, could you contain the fire there?” I asked.

“I…do believe that’s possible, yes,” Flamel said. “The opening that would give us might not be overly large, but disrupting the structure for long enough should at least allow us to determine the location of the entrance.”

Jeanne Alter’s grin gained teeth, so broad it threatened to split her face in half.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”

We all startled, whirling about towards the source of the smokey, unfamiliar alto that had just spoken. But there was no one there, no sign of another person aside from us, not even a vague silhouette looming from out of the fog. Another Assassin? But revealing herself would have torn away any semblance of Presence Concealment, wouldn’t it?

“On the roof!” said Arash, pointing, and when I followed the direction of his finger, I found the shape of a large bird perched upon the roof of a nearby building, peering down at us. A lump of foreboding settled in my stomach like ice.

It was a crow.