Chapter CLIV: Victorian Fairy Tale

The reveal that Jekyll was, in fact, Flamel’s Master didn’t really faze anyone that much after the first few seconds, but Marie had enough outrage to make up for it. The twins and Mash took it mostly in stride, after they had a moment to be surprised, and Mordred didn’t seem to care all that much in the face of all the other things that were currently on our collective plate. Emiya even accepted it like all of the puzzle pieces had suddenly fit together neatly, and Arash might just have figured it out on his own and kept quiet out of respect for Flamel and Jekyll’s privacy, because that was the kind of person he was.

Jeanne Alter, of course, didn’t really care, Jackie didn’t understand what the big deal was, and Nursery Rhyme was as placid and serene as she almost always was.

Marie, however, was furious, to the point that Romani had to step in to get her to calm down, although he himself wasn’t too happy either. Not before she started tossing around recriminations about how much the deception put our mission at risk and a few accusations of sabotage, but both Jekyll and Flamel took those on the chin, like they’d been expecting exactly that sort of reaction.

Maybe they had been. Neither of them was naive enough to believe that we would have just let it slide and moved on. We had taken them into our confidence, made them a part of our mission, crucial and critical as it was, and to some degree, they had abused that trust.

I couldn’t find it in myself to be too angry with them. I wanted to be, but I’d spent most of the last few days suspicious of Flamel to one degree or another, and while knowing this sooner might have avoided some of that, it might just have made me suspicious of Jekyll, too.

Either way, we couldn’t afford to spend the entire afternoon on it. Emiya went and made us a quick lunch while we all cooled down, and once that was eaten — in a very awkward silence — we had to get ready and leave again.

I hadn’t said so out loud, but I had a new suspicion about who M was. With Perrault all but confirmed to be involved and the forest of thorns from The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood on full display, my theory was that the Demon God in charge of making this Singularity had twisted Perrault to his cause the same way Medea the younger had been, leaving the creations of his Noble Phantasm to handle all of the more challenging aspects of managing things.

If that was the case, then M might just be the queen from the same story, the prince’s mother, with ogre in her blood, who grew resentful of the Sleeping Beauty and her children and demanded each night to eat one of them. If I was right, then we literally couldn’t afford to wait until the morning anyway, even if we had been tempted to, because Renée might not last the night.

And on a more practical note, I didn’t want to find out what might come of the evil queen if she swallowed the Philosopher’s Stone in Renée’s body. I was sure that it would be nothing good.

Fortunately, Flamel’s Noble Phantasm proved as useful as Jekyll had suggested it would be, and when we stepped out into the mist, the only thing that made me want to gag and cough was the smell. The effects of his Noble Phantasm canceled out both the underlying toxicity and the volatile magical energy, but the rancid scent was only marginally improved from what I remembered of it when we first arrived.

It was tempting to put on my mask, but we needed as united a front as we could get, and with moods soured by any or all of the things that had come up in the aftermath of Renée’s kidnapping, we needed that unity desperately. It wasn’t pleasant to go without my mask, but as a show of solidarity with the rest of the team, I did.

“I guess it was too much to hope for, that this odor would have been taken care of, too,” Tohsaka muttered disgustedly.

“I’m gonna spend the first three days back at Chaldea huffing scented candles,” Rika agreed, no more pleased than he was.

Jackie looked up at me, concerned. “Mommy?”

The only thing I could really do was give her a reassuring smile and tell her, “It’s okay, Jackie. It’s working.”

This didn’t seem to satisfy her, so she stayed glued to my side for the rest of the trip — close enough to grab my mask in an emergency, I noted with a strange sense of pride — but she didn’t kick up a fuss about it either.

It seemed to take twice as long to get back to St. Paul’s Station as it had getting from there to the apartment an hour ago, no doubt owing to our group being so much larger and so many of us having to huddle around Flamel, but we got there without running into any enemy forces and no sign of M’s crow. Not, of course, that we could have seen it if it was perched motionlessly somewhere nearby, not with the fog being as thick as it was, but there were no overt signs of its presence.

I was going to assume she was watching us anyway. There were always dangers to assuming your enemy was more competent than they were, but underestimating the enemy was always worse, in my experience. Better to act as though she saw everything we were doing.

By the time we made it to the staircase leading down into the Underground, there was no indication of any further enemy action. The brambles and thorns, however, were still just as present as they had been when we left, and it was no less hazardous making our way down into the station. It was made all the more so by the fact that Jekyll, Tohsaka, and I had to stick so close to Flamel so that he had to exert himself as little as possible.

“Still think we should just burn all this shit down,” Jeanne Alter muttered mutinously.

“If we’re right about what’s going to be waiting up ahead, then you’ll have plenty to burn before this is over,” I told her.

She rolled her eyes. “You know what they say about promises, Master.”

“Don’t make one you can’t keep,” Rika chirped.

“Exactly.”

Somewhere in there, Ritsuka seemed to recognize a pop culture reference, but whatever it might have been, he didn’t feel like sharing, so I let it drop. No one else looked to be all that interested in pursuing it either.

The mood was just that dour.

Like the trip to the station, climbing down off of the platform and trekking through the tunnel proved just as slow and cumbersome, and if our pace had been slow earlier, then it was positively glacial now. Fortunately, nothing had changed down here either, so there were no new growths for us to watch out for or closed off passages to stymie our progress. Just the same forest of thorny branches jutting out of every possible surface like some kind of warning to stay away — and now, to leave Renée to whatever ultimate fate M imagined for her.

We didn’t heed it, of course, for all of the obvious reasons.

It took us the better part of another quiet hour to finally reach the spot we’d originally marked off, the place where we had been stumped before, and a quick check of the map and the location of Renée’s communicator showed that we were not that far from her. She was, however, still some one-hundred-fifty meters below us.

“We’re here,” I announced.

Everyone stopped and looked around. Flashlights swung, passing beams of intense light over each of the walls, but the tangle of branches remained stubbornly unmoved. No entrance had magically opened up for us.

“You sure, Senpai?” asked Rika doubtfully.

“Thought this shit was supposed to just open up for us or whatever,” Mordred agreed.

“I’m sure,” I said.

A moment of uneasy silence passed, and everyone kept looking. Fruitlessly, because there was no sign of a passageway or a break in the branches. Nothing had changed from when we were last here.

“Maybe…it was actually further along the line?” Mash suggested.

Maybe. I’d chosen this spot originally because it was the closest to the center of the Associaton’s Terminal, so I could very well be wrong. The problem was, this was also the closest we were to Renée’s position on the map; going forward or back would just take us further away.

“Maybe she was just talking shit out of her ass,” Mordred muttered darkly.

Tohsaka hissed an admonishment for her language, but as she always had, she ignored him completely.

“Maybe…it’s like a spell, and it needs an incantation,” Ritsuka suggested.

That…actually wasn’t a bad idea. In fact, we had an example of that sort of thing right here, didn’t we?

“Like when Alice summons the Jabberwocky,” said Tohsaka, realizing the same thing I just had.

“The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,” Nursery Rhyme recited.

“An excellent suggestion, Ritsuka,” Jekyll praised. “I fear, however, that it may find itself running afoul of a singular obstacle that we might find difficult to surmount. Are there any amongst us who is so familiar with the story that he might recite from memory the relevant passage?”

No one answered. Not even me. It had been too long, and my memory of the exact wording was fragmented and useless. I remembered the story beats and the plot points, not the prose itself.

“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” said Jeanne Alter. “Are you saying that we have to go to a library and check out a book before we can get to the final battle here? Seriously?”

Unfortunately —

“‘Your Highness,’ said he,” a new voice announced, “‘more than fifty years ago I heard my father say that in this castle lies a princess, the most beautiful that has ever been seen. It is her doom to sleep there for a hundred years, and then to be awakened by a king's son, for whose coming she waits.’”

The tunnel writhed and squirmed, the branches twisting and churning, recoiling like shadows from the light.

“This story fired the young prince. He jumped immediately to the conclusion that it was for him to see so gay an adventure through, and impelled alike by the wish for love and glory, he resolved to set about it on the spot.”

They pulled apart in the middle, spreading wide and bunching up at the sides until the section of tunnel they had concealed was laid bare. There was enough space between them for two of Babbage’s Helter Skelter to stand side by side.

“It’s working!” Arash declared.

“Hardly had he taken a step towards the wood when the tall trees, the brambles and the thorns, separated of themselves and made a path for him. He turned in the direction of the castle, and espied it at the end of a long avenue.”

And at last, the lines between the bricks glowed, and then the bricks themselves swiveled, turned, and spun inwards, folding away into each other and sinking through the wall to form an entrance, an entryway through the wall. At the bottom, more bricks unfolded outwards, forming a staircase that led down and into another tunnel, tall enough and wide enough that even Asterios could have easily squeezed into it and comfortably made his way through.

What lay at the bottom, it was impossible to see. The stairway turned or swerved or something somewhere deeper down, and the flashlight on my communicator simply wasn’t strong enough to reach it.

“Whoa,” Rika whispered.

“Okay,” said Jeanne Alter, reluctantly impressed, “I have to admit, that’s pretty cool.”

Mordred snorted. “That? It’s a parlor trick. You ever meet Gawain? Ask that guy about Rigomer. Makes this look tame.”

“The method of protection is unique, but the tunnel itself is fairly standard,” Flamel agreed. “Mister Andersen. I was wondering where it was you had gotten off to.”

The thump of his oversized book snapping shut echoed in the quiet of the tunnel, and Andersen stepped closer to the group, into the light of our flashlights. They glinted off his glasses as he adjusted them.

“Mister Andersen,” said Mash, “how did you know?”

“I followed them, of course,” Andersen said. “When Renée fled the apartment, I trailed her in spirit form. That mangy cat and his master never even sensed me — one of the perks of being a Servant with such a pathetically weak Saint Graph. I might as well have been a fly on the wall for all the attention they paid me.”

“Cat?” asked Arash, brow furrowing.

“The eponymous Puss in Boots, as he introduced himself,” Andersen confirmed. “He dressed pretty smartly for a cat, but then I suppose that’s part of his story, isn’t it? While the wicked wolf chased her off, Puss waited for Renée on the street and coerced her cooperation through threats. At that point, it wasn’t hard to guess just who was involved. A forest of thorns? A monster wolf that could mimic others’ voices? A talking cat that used its wits and the promise of violence to get its way? As a fellow author of fairy tales, the answer couldn’t have announced itself to me more clearly if it was carrying a sign.”

Arash grimaced, a look of pained regret twisting his face. “Let me guess, an orange tabby?”

Andersen smiled thinly. “From the sound of it, you had the chance to meet him, too. You shouldn’t punish yourself too harshly. That cat’s entire story is about how he used trickery and deception to take his master from a penniless orphan to a prince of the kingdom. There’s no shame in being tricked by him.”

I wasn’t the only one who looked Arash’s way.

“Arash?” Mash asked.

“Renée’s been sneaking food to an orange tabby for the past couple of days,” he admitted. “It looked and behaved like an ordinary cat, so I assumed it was just a clever stray and left it alone, but…”

But it obviously wasn’t.

“So even someone like you can get taken in by a good enough conman,” Emiya remarked.

Arash sighed. “It seems so.”

If Puss was another one of M’s spies, then there was likely quite a bit more about us that she knew than I was really comfortable with, although exactly how much was up in the air. Our numbers, for sure, and at least some of our identities, as she had demonstrated. It didn’t really change anything, but it was still frustrating that she knew so much about us and all we had were guesses based upon logical conclusions.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

At least we could confirm Perrault was among the enemy’s forces. Not only because the forest of thorns opened the way it had, but because a talking cat calling itself Puss in Boots all but cemented it.

“I’m guessing you’re coming along,” I said to Andersen. At least he’d finally been helpful. I could give him a little leeway for that.

He smiled another thin smile. “After I had to go all the way back to that bookshop just to make sure I could be here with the correct passage to make sure you could all get through? If I’m going to have to sit around and accomplish nothing else for the rest of this farce, then I might as well do it where I can see whether or not I’m doomed.”

“How noble of you!” Jeanne Alter said with a nasty grin.

“We’re grateful for your help, Mister Andersen,” Ritsuka said diplomatically.

“You can repay me by winning,” Andersen said bluntly. “Put an end to this mess so we can all go home and call it a day.”

“Yes,” Flamel replied grimly, “yes, I suppose we ought to, hadn’t we? After all, that which doesn’t belong in this era has no place in it. It must be removed, no matter what.”

“Abe…” Rika murmured.

“Fuck that,” Mordred said immediately. “We’ll figure something out. First, though, we gotta go and kick some pretentious bitch’s ass. We can worry about everything else after we’re sure there’ll be an after to worry about.” She huffed. “Once this bitch is in the ground, we can focus on the important stuff. Like finding someplace for Renée to stay after all the rest gets booted back to where it belongs.”

“Uhn!” Fran agreed.

If only it could be that simple.

“Then let’s get going,” I said.

No one disagreed, and we filed into the tunnel and down the steps in much the same order as we’d been going. Mash and Mordred took point, as both our first line of defense and our strongest close quarters offense, the best response we had if we were ambushed. Arash and Nursery Rhyme took up the rear, with us Masters squished in the middle, Tohsaka, Jekyll, and me crowded around Flamel.

The stairs went down quite a ways, curving eventually into a gentle spiral that we couldn’t do anything except follow. There was no way to tell exactly how much farther down they went either, as it was a single tunnel down and there wasn’t some giant shaft that let us see exactly how deep the spiral stretched. It was not like they showed in the movies, where a look over the side showed an enormous drop down into a dark pit. It was only a single hallway that looked as though it was some magical gateway to another world, and all we had to do to reach it was to go all the way to the bottom.

I kept an eye on the map the entire way, watching the distance between us and Renée’s communicator slowly shrink. Flamel probably thought he went unnoticed every time he glanced over at it anxiously, but I didn’t comment on it. It wasn’t like he didn’t have a reason.

What I really wanted to know was how Angrboða connected to everything. How did the vents all reach this far? How did they all pump steam out from the machine and into the air? How had they been made? Were they constructed at the same time as this underground lair, all in the span of a few days? The logistics of it made my head spin.

Most importantly, if we had to disable the machine and disconnect it from whatever system it was using before we could retrieve the Grail, how did we do that? I wasn’t sure we would have an answer until we were looking right at it.

Eventually, the stairway reached an end, and we found ourselves walking into a tunnel not all that dissimilar from the ones that the Association had excavated beneath the British Museum. Walls made of stone bricks that curved up into the ceiling, cast iron braziers that contained wooden torches, eternally burning — a feat, considering the fog still oozed through the corridor, leaving the walls and floor damp and slippery.

“Incredible,” said Mash. “There are…no records of this place in proper history. Could it be that this was part of some national secret, or…did M construct all of this herself?”

I guess I wasn’t the only one wondering about that.

“It’s rather like a castle, isn’t it?” said Andersen. “Built upside down, stretching towards the center of the Earth instead of up towards the sky.”

“Wouldn’t that mean we’re technically standing on the ceiling?” Emiya pointed out.

Andersen grimaced. “…Maybe not quite that way, since that would mean the floor would be curved for some nonsensical reason, but I think the comparison stands.”

Considering who we were pretty sure we were going to find up ahead? Yes, a fairly apt comparison. It even made a further degree of sense if Perrault had simply manifested Sleeping Beauty’s castle underground, connecting it to a tunnel that Babbage might have helped construct. We would have just descended through one of the towers, in that case.

It seemed a little far-fetched, but I didn’t have much in the way of better ideas.

The ever-present steam made it hard to see much of anything too far ahead of us, but as we walked, the clinking of the automata further on was too distinctive to miss.

“Guess M wasn’t stupid enough to leave this place completely undefended!” Mordred said, and barely had the words left her mouth before she was racing off to crush them all.

“Sir Mordred!” Mash called after her, and she looked ready to give chase until Ritsuka set a hand on her shoulder.

“Let her handle it on her own,” he told Mash. “She needs to blow off some steam, and she can handle it by herself.

Through the fog came the sounds of battle, but especially the distinctive clatter of the automata breaking beneath Mordred’s strength and their shattered pieces tumbled across the stone floor. Mash relaxed and heaved a sigh.

“You’re right,” she said. “It sounds like it’s just some automata. Sir Mordred can deal with them on her own.”

“Gotta hand it to British,” Jeanne Alter drawled, “she sure knows how to smash some weak little dolls to bits.”

A few moments later, the sounds of battle came to a sudden stop with one, last warble skidding across the floor, and then Mordred returned, completely untouched but somewhat less tense than she had been a minute ago.

“Coast is clear,” she announced gruffly. She flicked what must have been some oil off of her sword with a single rough swing.

With the enemy guard taken care of, we kept going, passing the remnants of her skirmish along the way. Bits and pieces of a number of automata — all of them too destroyed to properly count — were strewn about all over, jagged and cracked. A hand with its too-long fingers laid there, a sculpted impression of lips and a nose laid over there, a thigh that had been snapped in half, a crumpled torso with huge chunks ripped out, an entire arm. Mordred hadn’t been gentle with them.

No one commented. The mood was still fairly dire, and none of us could blame her for working off some of her frustration after everything.

The corridor we were walking through eventually emptied out into a grand entrance hall, an enormous thing stretching up something like sixty feet with a vaulted ceiling. To our one side, there was what would have been the main entrance of a castle, with large windows whose curtains were drawn. The little we could see through the gaps showed only black earth outside. To our other side, there was a staircase, a short one with broad steps that reached up to another set of doors and then split to travel up both sides of the wall and towards balconies that overlooked the rest of the hall.

What else might be up there, I couldn’t see. The fog obscured the finer details, and if not for that, then the lack of any light except the torches would have done much the same.

The final route was across from us, another hallway leading on someplace else.

“Crap,” said Rika. “Multiple choice. I always sucked at those questions.”

My immediate, visceral reaction was to ask how, but this wasn’t the time or the place.

“And now the obvious question,” said Flamel, “which door do we take?”

Which door, indeed. I felt like the corridor across from us almost certainly had to be a waste of time. If it led anywhere at all, then it wouldn’t lead to anywhere that had enough space to accommodate Angrboða. If we went left and up the stairs, those doors probably led into the great hall, and that was probably more than big enough to contain the giant steam machine. Whether or not Renée would also be there, that was a harder question.

I wished I could use my bugs. They would have made exploring this place a whole lot easier.

The last option was the main entrance, which would no doubt take us “back outside.” What that might mean, I could only imagine. Maybe nothing. Maybe the door would open up and there wouldn’t be anything but dirt on the other side, or maybe it wouldn’t open at all because the dirt was in the way.

It seemed like the easiest one to test.

“We’ve done most of the rest in reverse, haven’t we? Come down from the tower where Sleeping Beauty rested and into the castle’s hall,” I said confidently. “We’ll try the main entrance first.”

“As reasonable a supposition as any,” Jekyll agreed.

“Uhn,” Fran grunted, doubtful.

Most of the rest were just as dubious about it, but no one contradicted me, so we walked out into the entrance hall and made for the large front doors.

“Father!” Renée’s voice suddenly cried. “Father, please!”

Flamel startled and spun around. “Renée?”

He made to follow it, but Arash’s hand found his arm and held him back.

“Don’t!” he cautioned Flamel. “Remember what we’re up against! Has Renée ever called you ‘Father’ before?”

Realization sparked in Flamel’s eyes. “She hasn’t.”

A low, dark chuckle reverberated throughout the hall, and Mash gasped, leaping up and into the air above us. My head swiveled and my neck bent to follow her, but I only caught a faint glimpse of something huge falling from the ceiling before the only thing I could see was Mash’s legs and backside.

The screech of something sharp dragging down the surface of her shield screamed in my ears like nails on a chalkboard, and whatever it was bounced off as the force of the collision threw Mash back the way she’d come. She landed behind us, none the worse for wear.

That was when I got my first look at the wicked wolf.

Calling him a werewolf wasn’t inaccurate. The hindlegs were definitely canine, with the characteristic second joint and everything, curved backwards, with a tail that lazily swung back and forth like a pendulum, but the torso was incongruently human, with a broad, enormous chest and shoulders that spanned twice the width of his lower body. His long arms were half again as long as they should have been, with humanoid fingers and thumbs and wickedly long, sharp claws. His head, meanwhile, was just as huge, with a maw large enough that it looked like he could indeed have swallowed a little girl in one go and teeth long and sharp enough to gnaw through her bones.

He reminded me of Lung, half-transformed, only covered head to toe in dark fur instead of silvery scales. It was the eyes, however, that made him look truly terrifying, a shade of poisonous yellow so bright they seemed to glow and ringed on the edges with bright orange, making them look as though they were made of fire.

“Clever little lamb,” rumbled the wolf. His eyes swiveled, taking us each in at once. “Ah, and if it isn’t the morsels from earlier! It seems you’ve brought me a larger meal, this time. How kind of you to feed this poor, starving wolf!”

“Alice!” Tohsaka barked.

“— and burbled as he came!” Nursery Rhyme finished.

The Jabberwocky sprang into existence already in motion, leaping toward the wicked wolf without a sound. It attacked immediately and without hesitation, landing a series of rapid blows — that accomplished absolutely nothing, because the wolf didn’t even flinch.

“This again?” the wolf complained. “I can’t eat empty air, little morsel.”

But Nursery Rhyme was already calling upon another of her monsters. “— shun the frumious Bandersnatch!”

What came forth next was both similar and yet nothing like the Jabberwocky. Compared to the surprisingly humanoid Jabberwocky, in fact, it was far closer to an animal, some bizarre cross between a dog, a cat, and a lizard. It moved on all fours with long, feline legs, and yet it crouched low to the floor like some kind of reptile and leapt from place to place like a frog. Folds of skin wrinkled along its neck, and a head crowned with jagged, mismatched spikes bared a mouth full of sharp, pointed teeth.

Mottled green and black skin flickered in the light of the torches as it moved, bouncing from place to place almost as though it was teleporting, and it came at the wicked wolf from behind, neck lengthening and extending as it sank those fangs as deep as it could into the wolf’s shoulder. The instant it had latched on with its jaws, the rest of its body followed, neck retracting, until it had attached itself to the wolf, sharp claws sinking in wherever they could find purchase.

“More trinkets?” the wolf thundered. “More toys? I hunger, little morsel! I will have you all!”

“Tohsaka!” I barked at him. Remember the plan! I didn’t say, because I didn’t need to.

“Right!” said Tohsaka. “Alice!”

“Don’t worry, Papa!” Nursery Rhyme said. “My friends and I can keep him here! It’s time for you to go and rescue the princess! Make sure you give her a kiss to wake her up, okay?”

Tohsaka’s face flickered through several different emotions before settling back on solemn determination. “Right. Alice… I’m ordering you not to die, got it?”

She giggled. “Of course!”

Mash covered us as we turned back to the doors. Together, Emiya and Arash reached for the handles to open them.

“Still not sure we should be leaving her behind,” Ritsuka muttered.

“The Jabberwocky, the Bandersnatch, and the wicked wolf are all creatures of fantasy,” Flamel explained. “If they can die at all, then they must die in accordance with how their stories say they died. Otherwise, all that can be done is to hold them off until either they or their master runs out of the energy to sustain them.”

“Then we’d better be fast,” was all Tohsaka said in reply.

The massive doors opened inward with a creak, and I half-expected a ton of dirt to come tumbling through the door, but what waited on the other side wasn’t solid earth, it was…

“Another tunnel?”

“How did they dig all of these tunnels so gosh-darn fast?” Rika demanded.

“You won’t escape ME!” the wolf howled from behind us.

The sound of ripping flesh and the wet splat of blood landing on the ground echoed, and Emiya turned back first out of all of us, hand reaching up as though to grasp something on his back (“Trace, on!”), and suddenly, he was holding…an ax?

By the time I turned around to watch the path of his throw, the ax had already left his hand and hit his target, cutting deep into the wolf’s shoulder.

The wolf howled.

“KILL YOU!” he roared. “KILL YOU, KILL YOU, KILL YOU!”

The Jabberwocky got in his way before he could even try, but the wolf ignored its punches the same as before, digging his claws into the Jabberwocky’s flesh and wildly tearing chunks away.

“Jabberwocky!” said Nursery Rhyme. “The ax! Use the ax!”

And it did, grabbing the handle of the ax — so tiny looking in its massive fist — and yanking it free. The wolf let out another furious howl as blood spurted from the wound, but he didn’t stay still to let the Jabberwocky swing the borrowed ax his way, instead throwing himself backwards so quickly he almost appeared to teleport. Almost as an afterthought, he ripped the Bandersnatch off of his back and threw it so hard against the wall that the entire hall quivered.

The ax wound, however, was not so quick to close and vanish nor so swiftly ignored, and I wasn’t the only one who realized it.

“Emiya!” Rika began.

But Nursery Rhyme twisted to look back at us, waving over her shoulder with a smile. “Thanks for the ax, Mister Emiya! Take good care of Papa and go teach that lady a lesson, okay?”

Right. Because even if we killed the wicked wolf, it would only be a delay. It was not a Servant, and therefore it didn’t have a Saint Graph and wasn’t summoned the way a Servant would be. It could very easily be summoned back, forcing us to waste time and energy to face it every time, and the only way to get rid of it for good was to eliminate Perrault. There was no point in fighting it ourselves and no point in trying to kill it.

I grabbed Rika by the wrist and pulled her along, and she yelped before falling into step. Ahead, Mordred charged into the tunnel and towards the ominous glow that emanated from further in, and the rest of us followed in roughly the same formation we’d been using, with Arash and Mash bringing up the rear. Arash peppered the wicked wolf with arrows as he went, but they accomplished almost nothing, and the rare few that penetrated past the fur were easily ignored. The wicked wolf had eyes only for Nursery Rhyme and her Jabberwocky. The Bandersnatch might as well have been a gnat buzzing around his head.

Past the huge double doors, there were a couple of stone steps, but we practically flew down them and onto the dirt floor that made up the tunnel. Unlike the corridor we’d walked through and the winding flight of stairs we’d descended before, this was all roughly hewn rock and packed earth, not all that dissimilar from the cavern in Fuyuki that had housed the Great Grail, where King Arthur had waited for us.

The instant Mash was clear, the doors swung shut with a bang.

It was tempting to look back — Rika and Ritsuka both did, glancing over their shoulders — but I focused on the tunnel ahead and the glow that awaited at the end of it. The fog was still there, but not quite as dense as it had been everywhere else. Not so thin that I would have dared to step outside of the radius of Flamel’s protection without my mask on, but thin enough that it was easier to see the tunnel around us once our flashlights were turned on.

Ten, twenty, thirty, fifty feet passed in total, and then a gate loomed ahead of us, jutting out of the rock incongruently. It matched the castle hall and the corridor with its curved ceiling, but it looked odd, like it had been buried beneath millennia of sediment and only this part, the gateway itself, had been excavated.

Another thirty feet disappeared beneath us, and then we were through. On the other side —

“Whoa, wait, this looks way too familiar!” said Rika.

— a massive cavern easily a match for the one in Fuyuki and at least the size of the one beneath Mount Etna. The eerie glow came from some point in the distance, where a massive shape loomed through the darkness and the steam, an enormous, thousand-armed construct with a body the size of a small house and tubes that connected it to the ceiling.

“It’s just like the Grail cavern in Fuyuki,” Mash breathed.

“Yes,” Emiya agreed, suspicious, “yes, it is.”

And standing in the way, waiting for us…

“Welcome, Chaldeans.”

…a pair of cold, yellow eyes above a thin-lipped smile appeared from out of the fog.

“I do believe I made you a promise, didn’t I?”