Chapter CLV: The Evil Fairy

“Poor, poor Renée,” said M as she slowly stalked closer, little more than a tall, lean silhouette against the fog. There was a mocking lilt to her voice, a false concern so transparent that it fooled no one at all. “It seems that her companions — indeed, even her dearest father — care not at all for what becomes of her.”

Flamel moved before the words even finished registering in my brain, and the ground rippled as pillars of stone shot up from the cavern floor and surrounded M in a prison until the only thing visible was her face. The instant she was caught, they transformed into steel, creating a kind of twisted sarcophagus.

“Abraham!” Jekyll cried, alarmed.

“You will tell me what you did with Renée,” Flamel snarled. “Now.”

“How rude,” said M calmly. “Is this how you treat all of your hosts as they come to welcome you into their homes? Have you no manners at all?”

Green light poured out from around her face.

“From dust you were born, and dust you shall become,” she intoned dramatically. Her words tumbled together so quickly that it was almost hard to pick out the individual ones. “Behold your magic, for now it is undone!”

Cracks formed in the surface of the steel trap, spilling more green light out into the air, and then the entire thing exploded, throwing clumps of dirt — not steel — out in every direction and clearing the air around her. For a moment, a handful of seconds that might not last longer than that, there was nothing obscuring her at all.

Finally, we got a good look at the person we were dealing —

My thoughts ground to a halt.

“Ho-lee fuck,” Rika said breathlessly. “Maleficent!”

And it was. She looked distinctly more real than the last time I remembered seeing her, but the high cheekbones, the ruby red lips, the devilish horns that jutted up from her head, the black robes, they all looked like they had been ripped right out of the 1959 movie.

“W-what?” Mash squeaked.

“That…shouldn’t be possible,” said Emiya, just as spooked as I was.

“It seems I need no introduction,” M said lightly, smiling. “But you look quite disturbed — perhaps a less intimidating form might better suit the situation?”

She spread her arms, her robe billowing around her.

“A pleasing face masking fury and rage,” she nearly sang, voice deep and resonant, “now abandon it for wisdom and age!”

And just like that, the lean, youthful visage melted away, cheeks drooping and skin sagging as she grew forty years in less than four seconds. Her body shrank and filled out until she was hunched over her staff, gripping the top with gnarled hands. Deep wrinkles formed around her mouth and her eyes, crow’s feet so prominent they looked carved from stone.

“Would this be more to your liking?” she asked, voice thinner and reedier. “As close to the description given as can be, sparse though it was, isn’t it?”

She was just like the wicked wolf. No, that was obvious the instant I realized who she was, because even though Rika called her Maleficent — a neat and tidy M name to fit with what we knew about the conspirators behind this Singularity — I knew the story behind the movie. The basics had been done right, for sure, but once you got past her introduction and the first few acts she performed in the movie, Maleficent started to become more and more a creation of the animators, directors, and storyboarders than Perrault himself.

“You shouldn’t exist,” I found myself saying before I could stop myself.

Because the evil fairy in The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood had only had a single role, had shown up to the celebration of the princess’s birth, taken offense at both not being invited and at the hastily arranged accommodations being substandard compared to the other fairies, and then cast the curse on the infant princess. After that, she disappeared from the tale, forgotten. She hadn’t even been given a name, but then again, in Perrault’s version, I didn’t think any of the characters had one.

The aged cheeks pulled into a cold smile. “Shouldn’t I? And yet, whether you think so or not, here I am, aren’t I?”

“You will find,” Emiya murmured, echoing something that he had said what felt now like a lifetime ago, “that most Heroic Spirits will be mellowed out and moderated by how perspectives changed over the years.”

A chill swept down my spine. He’d said that to Rika about Cúchulainn to help her understand that the Servants we met weren’t going to be flies trapped in amber, perfectly preserved exactly as they had been in life, but evolving people changed by the advance of social equality and societal expectations. Heroic Spirits could be changed by their legends and by what people thought of those legends centuries later, even if those changes completely distorted the original myth.

I should have considered that sooner.

The evil fairy laughed and was consumed by green fire, her cackles echoing, and a moment later, the tall, slender form of Maleficent stood before us again.

“And how fortunate for me that is,” she said gleefully. “Why, I think I should thank that man for having bestowed upon me such a precious gift. His name was…Walt, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Ritsuka managed to say, although it came out a little shaky.

“A shame,” said the evil fairy. “But I think, instead, that you all will served as fine substitutes —”

A gout of flame suddenly leapt across the distance, growing larger as it did and consuming the evil fairy in her entirety. The remaining magical energy in the thin fog that still lingered about ignited, too, and I had to wince and fight the urge to close my eyes and turn away as the pyre burned.

But the flames turned green, and that echoing laughter rang out as they slowly died away. The evil fairy stood there as she had before, completely untouched and sneering triumphantly at us.

“Fuck,” said Jeanne Alter. “That bitch isn’t even singed.”

“Wanna try that again?” Mordred asked dryly.

“Fuck you, British.”

“Fire?” the evil fairy crowed. “How pedestrian! How quaint! Why, I might even have felt that — if it were thrice as hot, that is!”

“She’s another creature of fairy tale,” Flamel said grimly. “We will find, I think, that she is equally impervious to our attacks as the wicked wolf was. The only way to kill her would be to do so in the same way she died in her story.”

And she didn’t die in her story. She was so much closer to a plot device than a proper character that no other mention had been made of her once she performed the function for which she existed, and only a vague implication that may just have been imagined by the literary scholars hinted that she might have been the crone whose spindle the princess had pricked her finger upon.

Even if we accepted that as truth, so what? The crone hadn’t died either.

“There’s something I’m not getting,” said Rika, lowly and for once serious. “If she’s M, and M is the mastermind who did all of the funky indoctrination stuff to Mister P and Babbs, and she’s just another fairytale…thing from that other guy’s NP, then… Who’s really behind all of this?”

A very, very good question, and one I wasn’t sure I had the answer to. M was, supposedly, the one twisting all of the other Servants to do her bidding, but if she was, in the end, just another manifestation of Perrault’s Noble Phantasm, then who or what had twisted Perrault to begin with? Another one of those Demon Gods? I didn’t have a better answer.

If so, where was it hiding? In Angrboða?

“Well?” said the evil fairy. “Care to try something else? Poor Renée is waiting for her rescue, and, why, I seem to be the only thing standing in your way, aren’t I?”

“Abraham,” Jekyll muttered, “have you aught else we might attempt?”

“We…could try running down her stock of magical energy,” said Flamel, “but if she is connected directly to the Grail, then…”

Then she had functionally infinite energy to call upon. Even if we obliterated her entire body in one go — without doing any significant damage to the cavern, that was, and risking our own lives — then she might just reform like nothing had happened. Balmung could definitely destroy her, and so could Aífe’s Thunder Feat, Mordred’s Clarent Blood Arthur, Jeanne Alter’s La Grondement du Haine, and just about every large scale attack we had.

But would she stay dead? Would she actually die if we killed her?

On the other hand, she wasn’t a Servant, not really. She was the product of Perrault’s Noble Phantasm, and that meant Perrault had to be around here somewhere. The easiest and safest way of getting rid of her would be to simply get rid of Perrault. She and the wicked wolf would both just vanish once he was gone, leaving the path to the Grail free and clear.

The only trouble was, Perrault himself might be hooked up to the Grail, and she was still standing in that path, so we needed some way to remove her from it, or at least some way of getting around her in the meantime. A distraction to keep her busy instead of brute force to take her out and hope she stayed out.

Arash abruptly spun around, arms blurring as he fired off a barrage of arrows behind us, and a furious yowl told me who he was aiming at before I even turned to look. An orange tabby in nobleman’s clothes threw himself out of the way, managing to avoid all but the trio of arrows that ripped his cloak to shreds.

“You were careless, Puss,” the evil fairy scolded him.

“My apologies, Madam,” the cat said in a faint French accent. He slowly stalked around our group, keeping himself turned towards us the entire time and ready to dodge again if he needed to. Arash kept his bow aimed at the cat, but held back on attacking again. “I’m afraid I could not contain my bloodlust at the very last second. That Archer’s sight was much too clear.”

The evil fairy hummed. “No matter. It would have been convenient, had you managed to take out one of their Masters, but it makes no real difference, in the end.”

Another enemy…but at least this meant that we knew where Puss was. We wouldn’t have to worry about him ambushing us now that he was in plain sight.

“Huh,” said Rika, like she was asking about the weather. “Hey, Arash, that’s the guy who kidnapped Renée, right?”

“That’s him,” Andersen answered. “That hat, those clothes, those boots, there’s no mistaking Puss in Boots this close up.”

Rika nodded. “Right. Emiya? Kill him.”

Emiya didn’t even hesitate. In a single blur of movement, he’d nocked an arrow on his bow — a simple looking longsword, reshaped into a thin shaft of metal like some kind of giant needle — and pulled back on the string. Puss didn’t even have time to react before his head simply vanished in an explosion of blood and gore, leaving the rest of him to fall to the ground limply.

“Holy shit!” Jeanne Alter burst out, delighted.

“Damn,” said Mordred. “Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“M-Master?” Mash asked, surprised.

“You know that’s not going to accomplish anything,” Andersen said.

“Yeah,” Rika admitted. “But it made me feel better.”

“It was cathartic,” Flamel agreed grimly.

“How utterly ruthless of you,” the evil fairy said with a smile. She glanced over at the headless cat. “Puss. Stop playing around and pull yourself together.”

The body suddenly leapt gracefully back to its feet, landing on all fours, and an instant later a new head had formed, blossoming from the bloody neck like a flower in bloom. Puss rolled his head and shoulder as though working out a kink, and then with a sigh, stood back up on his hindlegs.

“Now, was that truly necessary?” he asked, exasperated. “Even if it is not a permanent wound, I happen to quite like my head, thank you. It is my best feature.”

“At least you didn’t piss him off,” Ritsuka muttered.

So if we couldn’t kill either of them or deal any real, meaningful damage, then a distraction really did seem to be our only option.

Arash, I asked him silently, do you see Renée or Perrault over there anywhere?

He frowned and squinted through the fog towards Angrboða, and a moment later, told me, Not clearly, no. There’s a lot going on over by that giant steam engine, so they could be anywhere over there.

Great. Another consideration: we couldn’t just toss every Noble Phantasm with a blast radius at them unless we wanted to risk Renée’s life, too, nevermind what might happen to the Grail if it got caught up in things by accident. We had to be more precise than that.

The third thing I needed to keep in mind: Jekyll, Tohsaka, and I couldn’t leave Flamel’s side, and a group that big wasn’t going to sneak around them without being noticed. Mash wasn’t exactly stealthy either, and having the twins rush off with our best defense when we might need it would be dangerous at best and fatal at worst.

If all we needed was Perrault dead, however, then we didn’t strictly have to be the ones doing it. As long as he died, that was all that mattered. It didn’t have to be one particular knife that did the job, let alone mine.

“Flamel,” I said lowly, “can you keep up your Noble Phantasm while you fight, or is it too much for you?”

He grimaced. “It would be better not to split my focus. My apologies — I allowed my temper to get the best of me when we first laid eyes upon her and unnecessarily put you at risk.”

It wasn’t okay, but it was understandable. I couldn’t blame him for flying off the handle when the evil fairy showed up, especially with her mocking. Not when Renée’s life hung in the balance. Not when she was responsible for kidnapping Renée in the first place.

Maybe she was pushing a few of my buttons, too.

“Then don’t push yourself.”

“I thought Doctor Jekyll was his Master,” Tohsaka muttered.

“I have no business commanding a battle,” said Jekyll lowly. “If it would see this business done and settled, then I will gladly submit to her judgment on the matter.”

Good. No need to worry about him trying to countermand me, then.

Jeanne Alter, I projected down our bond.

She twitched, lip curling, but gave no other obvious signs that she’d heard me at all. Yeah?

I need you to relay a message to Ritsuka and Rika, I told her. We’re going to keep Maleficent and Puss distracted, so we need to treat this battle like we’re taking it seriously.

For a moment, she didn’t respond. What do you mean by “seriously?”

Everything is on the table except large scale Noble Phantasms, I said bluntly.

Her cheek twitched, threatening a smile. Now you’re speaking my fucking language. Sure, I can let the dweebs know.

“Plotting, are you?” asked the evil fairy knowingly. A cruel smile curled her lips. “Very well. I suppose I can afford you a moment to realize the hopelessness of your situation. But only a moment.”

“You are too generous, Madam,” Puss demurred, “but if that is your wish, then I suppose I cannot convince you otherwise.”

The evil fairy chuckled lowly. “Never let it be said that I am not magnanimous.”

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Puss’s muzzle curled into a passable imitation of a grin. “Perish the thought!”

The relaying of the plan was entirely visual. Without a direct line, I could only watch the expressions on the faces of the others — first the twins, then Emiya, Mordred, and Mash — as they traded back and forth on the details, such as they were. I took those few seconds to contact Arash.

I’m going to send Jackie on ahead to take care of Perrault, I told him, and he stilled, finger twitching on the bowstring. While she searches for him and takes him out, we’ll be keeping Puss and the evil fairy’s attention entirely on us, however we can.

Got it, he replied, and then predicted me. I’ll make sure Puss doesn’t go running off after her either.

I gave a slow, shallow nod. Good.

Aloud, I said, “We don’t have any other choice. We have to go through her if we want to find Renée and take back the Grail. We can’t afford to destroy either, so no Anti-Army or Anti-Fortress Noble Phantasms.”

Deliberately, I let myself be loud enough that the evil fairy and Puss could both hear us, but not so loud that it would seem intentional.

“Right!” said Mash. “We have to rescue Miss Renée!”

Mordred clicked her tongue. “No Noble Phantasms? That’s how it’s gonna be, huh?”

“She doesn’t ask for much, does she?” Emiya agreed dryly, adding to the ruse.

“What’re you two complaining about?” Jeanne Alter drawled, readying her sword. “A handicap is going to make this fun!”

“For a total nutjob, maybe,” Andersen muttered.

“Uhn,” said Fran. “Uhn uh-uh-ah uhn?”

“I’m sorry,” I told her.

“Uh-uhn,” was her reply, grudging but understanding. She might be superhuman, but being merely superhuman wasn’t enough in a battle between Servants.

Jackie, I saved for last, while we’re keeping them busy, I need you to sneak away and go over towards that big machine. You need to find a Servant in there — a man with a book, probably hooked up to it — and kill him. It’s the only way we can defeat that fairy and Puss.

Jackie nodded to me. Okay, Mommy! We understand!

“Done?” asked the evil fairy archly. “Then let us, as they say, start Round Two.”

She raised her hands and held her staff high above her head. “Scorching heat with deadly aim, now carry on the winds a ball of flame!”

A swirling ball of fire formed swiftly in front of the head of her staff, growing from a baseball to a beach ball almost instantly, and as the final word left her lips, it shot towards us like a cannonball. Mash threw herself forward and blocked the entirety of it with a grunt as it washed over the surface of her shield, licking at the edges almost greedily.

“She just cast Fireball!” Rika yelped.

“Yeah?” said Mordred. “Then I’m gonna cast sword!”

As though that was a signal, everyone else leapt into action, Puss first and foremost. With a yowl, he charged our way, claws extended like knives, and Emiya met him, discarding his bow for his favored pair of twin swords.

They were not evenly matched. Even from the start, it was obvious that Puss, for all his talents, was an ambush predator used to using surprise and brute force to take down his enemies, ripping them apart with his claws. Emiya might not have had the same level of skill as someone like Aífe or Hippolyta, but it was still more than Puss had, and so whatever difference there might have been in physical ability, the gap between their skill levels closed it.

That didn’t mean that Puss was easily taken down either, though. He seemed to favor alternating between hit-and-run tactics and sudden, vicious assaults, swiping for every vital point he could with his razor sharp claws before retreating to try again. Against a human or a Caster who couldn’t fight back, it probably would have been that simple, just because he had so many sharp weapons attached to each of his paws, but Emiya was also the sort of fighter who preferred to wield multiple weapons at once.

Mash, of course, stayed back, always between us and the enemy so that she could block anything aimed our way at a moment’s notice. Mordred and Jeanne Alter, on the other hand, gladly took the fight to the evil fairy, rushing to follow her as she backpedaled away from us so smoothly that she looked like she was gliding.

“Light, attend to me and become my shield!” she incanted. “Storm, cast judgment upon my foes afield!”

A translucent barrier formed in front of her, a curved pane of green light large enough to have protected our entire group and then some, and Mordred and Jeanne Alter crashed into it, only to suddenly rebound as wind burst out of the pane and sparks of electricity shot up their swords and into their bodies.

They both landed and rolled, Mordred digging her hands into the dirt to bleed off momentum and Jeanne Alter using her sword as a sort of brake as it carved a gouge.

“Fuck!” Mordred cursed furiously. The hand on her sword suddenly spasmed, and her gauntlet creaked as she forced herself to grip the hilt even tighter. “The more shit I see you do…the more you remind me of someone I really don’t like!”

“Save your mommy issues for later, British!” Jeanne Alter snapped at her.

“Fuck you!”

Again, they leapt towards the evil fairy, and again, the shield bounced them backwards with a burst of wind and the sizzle of lightning, leaving Mordred’s already messy hair to start to stand on end. Jeanne Alter seemed at least slightly better off, but no less frustrated.

A quick surge of mana and a brief second to aim sent a Gandr shot directly at the barrier, testing it, but as I expected, I didn’t get anywhere. It splashed uselessly against the pane of light and dissipated, ineffective. So it didn’t just block brute force, it was just a general shield meant for protection, and there weren’t any tricks we could use to overwhelm it.

“Was that supposed to do anything?” Jeanne Alter asked me snidely. I didn’t bother to offer a response.

A third time, the two of them kicked off the ground, Mordred putting even more strength behind her sword now so that it crackled with the red jolts of her mana burst and Jeanne Alter adding flame to her swing, but just like the last two times, the pane of light took them without complaint and threw both Servants back. The evil fairy laughed maliciously, smug.

“Finding things a bit difficult?” she asked mockingly.

“Of course she has some of that fairy bullshit, too!” Mordred groused. “Fucking of course she does!”

She is called the evil fairy, I thought but didn’t say. It wouldn’t help. And technically speaking? It didn’t matter. Our goal wasn’t to kill the evil fairy to begin with.

Fran suddenly leapt into motion, sprinting away from the group without any warning whatsoever. It caught even me by surprise, and by the time I reached out to try and hold her back, she was already halfway to the evil fairy’s barrier.

She wasn’t a part of our planning session, I realized, so she didn’t know that we didn’t actually have to get through that barrier at all.

“Fran!” Mash and the twins called after her.

Mordred’s head spun around, but Fran was already past her, and she scrambled to follow. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Uhn!” was all Fran said.

She planted her hands against the barrier, and the gust of wind blew her back as she struggled to stay standing, but the burst of electricity traveled up her arms — and directly into the transformers nestled behind her ears. They hummed and glowed, whining for a split second, and then settled back down again.

The realization of what she was trying to do jolted in my stomach.

“Mordred, Jeanne Alter!” I ordered. “Keep her steady!”

“You outta your fucking mind?” Mordred snapped back at me. “She’s gonna get herself killed!”

“Just do it!”

“Rah!” Fran shouted, rushing back towards the barrier again.

“Shit!”

Mordred and Jeanne Alter raced to follow, and this time, when Fran placed her hands on the barrier, they dug in their heels and braced her by her shoulders. The wind whipped up and tried to force them away, throwing their hair all over the place, and the lightning crackled as it zapped Fran over and over again, but they all held strong.

And the jolts of electricity continued to flow up Fran’s arms, some splitting off and sparking over Mordred’s armor and Jeanne Alter’s fingers, but most of it traveling up into the transformers on Fran’s head. They spun up, whirring and grinding, glowing as they soaked up the electricity like a sponge, and Fran set her shoulders as her arms strained. I couldn’t see it from behind them, but I could imagine her gritting her teeth.

Long seconds passed as they struggled against the push of the barrier, more and more lightning flowing into Fran’s transformers, and they continued to whine, louder and louder with each passing second, glowing brighter and brighter. There had to be some kind of limit, I knew, and I had no doubts that Fran knew that just as well, but when she would reach it and what that limit was, I had no idea.

Then, suddenly, the transformers opened up all the way, revealing spinning wheels of white plasma, and Fran let out a growing shout.

“GRAH!”

And a veritable lightning storm burst out of her hands as all of the electricity she’d been absorbing was abruptly released in the opposite direction. A blinding flash lit up the cavern, bright as the sun and probably just as hot at the epicenter, and the crash of shattering glass was almost drowned out by the thunderous, echoing BOOM that shook me down to my bones.

The evil fairy’s startled shout, however, came in loud and clear.

I was still blinking away the spots in my vision when she pulled herself back to her feet, disheveled and furious.

“You wretched worm!” she howled. “How dare you!”

She lifted up her staff again, energy flowing into the bejeweled head, but Mordred gave her no chance to incant and raced across the distance. Faster than fast, she planted the blade of her sword in the evil fairy’s gut, tip first, splattering red blood across the cavern floor.

“Not so fast, bitch!”

“That’s my line, British!” Jeanne Alter crowed as she came down from the other side. She lopped off the evil fairy’s arm, leaving the sleeve and the staff to go flying. “Not so tough without your fancy-schmancy magic, are you?”

“ENOUGH!” the evil fairy roared, and she exploded into green fire, throwing both Mordred and Jeanne Alter away. The flames licked at her body as her severed arm slowly reformed, but her expression remained furious and incandescent.

“If you insist on being such a nuisance,” she hissed, “then we shall see how you knights in your shining armor fare against a foe more fearsome than your petty skills can match!”

She threw up her hands and her arms, and the green fire grew brighter and hotter until I could feel it on my face even from where I was. The evil fairy became nothing more than a silhouette against the backdrop, a shadow cast upon the wall of fire with glowing eyes.

“With sharp teeth and cruel horns and wings in flight, armored in scales as black as the night!” her voice rang out, echoing and resonant. “My breath becomes fire, my nails become spears, now turn into the monster born of men’s fears!”

The silhouette grew, larger and larger and larger, until it towered over us in a way that was frighteningly familiar. The arms thrown to either side twisted and morphed, becoming wings as the neck elongated and the horns expanded and lengthened. The eyes became like twin pits of molten flame as her torso stretched outwards, and the billowing cloak spread out and lengthened into a pair of gigantic legs and a long, serpentine tail.

Fuck. Damn it, Disney, if you were going to pick a villain to change so much from her original depiction, couldn’t you have chosen a character from a completely different fairy tale?

“Oh,” said Rika. “Oh, oh, oh, I remember this part!”

“So do I,” her brother said, “although right now, I’m really wishing I didn’t!”

“Oh dear,” said Flamel. “That’s not good.”

“Abraham?” asked Jekyll.

A booming sound echoed through the cavern, and with a sweep of her wings, the evil fairy revealed her new form in all its terrible glory. Standing nearly as tall as Fafnir had, with glistening scales black as pitch and a deep, purple underbelly, where the evil fairy had once been was now a massive dragon. Her maw was filled with teeth at least as long as I was tall, sharp and bone white, and her claws were dark and curved like the blades of scythes, digging deep furrows into the ground. Her presence filled the entire cavern, suffocating and malevolent, pressing down on me like a knife against my throat.

Haloed in the ominous light glowing from Angrboða, she looked far more like the evil dragon of legend than Fafnir had.

“What the fuck is this?” Mordred screamed. “How the fuck did you do that?”

A booming echo bounced off of the cavern walls, staccato and barking, and it took me a second to realize it was the evil fairy’s laughter.

“Fuck me,” said Jeanne Alter, “she turned herself into a goddamned dragon!”

“Th-this isn’t a part of the original fairy tale!” Mash insisted.

“Wait, really?” asked Rika. “Disney lied to me!”

The evil fairy breathed in, chest expanding as it filled with air, and her head reared back as more green fire licked at the corners of her mouth. Magical energy surged and condensed into a point somewhere in what had to be her lungs. Her intent was obvious.

“Mash!”

But if it was obvious to me, it was obvious to Ritsuka, too, who called out to Mash urgently.

“Right!”

Mash planted her shield in front of the group. “Lord Chaldeas!”

And the familiar rampart formed, building itself brick by brick until a translucent curtain wall stood between us and the evil fairy. No sooner had it finished forming than did the evil fairy’s head snap forward, mouth flying open, and the flames building in her throat were unleashed upon us in a torrent, a line, a stream of fire like napalm. It washed over the surface of Lord Chaldeas, so hot that I could feel some fraction of the heat even behind that protection, but the flames that could probably have melted my flesh from my bones splashed impotently against the barrier and spread to the sides before flickering into nothing.

For several long seconds, the stream kept going, but eventually, the evil fairy had to run out of breath and it petered out, leaving her to glare with her baleful eyes at the shield that had blocked her attack. With a snarl, she swung her massive claws at it instead, and a cacophonous screech split the air, but it was no more effective than her firebreath had been.

Of course not. She might have looked more the part of the evil dragon of legend, and she even had a degree of the metaphysical weight behind her, but at the end of the day, Fafnir had still been more. Facing up against him had been the first time I’d been really, truly frightened of an enemy for a long time, and a puffed-up fairytale villain in the shape of a dragon just didn’t inspire the same kind of terror.

“Hey, Senpai?” Rika said somewhat nervously. “Now might be a good time to get Sieggy in on the action, don’t you think? You know, since dragons are kinda his specialty?”

“Sieggy?” Jekyll asked, bewildered.

It wasn’t the worst idea, but —

“It won’t mean anything,” I told her. “She’s not a real dragon. She’s a character from a fairy tale. Balmung can’t kill her.”

“Don’t you remember?” Andersen added. “A creature of fairytale can only be killed by what killed them. Even if you brought a hero like Siegfried here to fight her, he won’t be able to do anything more than what Mordred and that pyromaniac are doing.”

So there was no point. We weren’t trying to kill her, just keep her busy until Jackie found Perrault. Bringing Siegfried in to fight her would just be wasting a charge of our Shadow Servant system that we might wind up needing here fairly soon.

Past Lord Chaldeas, the evil fairy sucked in another breath, more fire licking at the edges of her mouth.

“Mash!” Ritsuka cried again.

Another blast of flame slammed into Lord Chaldeas, and in the light it provided, I could see the beads of sweat beginning to form on Mash’s forehead as she continued to hold the barrier up. A keening groan was strangled in her throat, but she didn’t let our defense falter for even a single second.

“I-I’ll hold on for as long as I can, Senpai!” Mash reassured him.

How much longer that was, however, might not be all that long. Maintaining a Noble Phantasm as strong as Lord Chaldeas for an extended period of time couldn’t be easy, and the amount of energy she had to pour into it to keep it steady was probably going to get very expensive very quickly.

“Hey, fairy bitch!” Jeanne Alter’s voice called. “You screwed up big time turning yourself into a dragon, you know!”

The stream of fire cut off, and the evil fairy’s massive head turned her hellfire eyes to Jeanne Alter, a snarl rumbling in her throat. Jeanne Alter just grinned.

“Because me? I’m the Dragon Witch. Your scaly ass is mine.”

She leapt at the evil fairy, and the dragon recoiled, a roar ripping out of its maw as it tried to maneuver away. What the evil fairy had traded for in raw power, however, she had lost in speed and dexterity. She could wiggle, she could writhe, she could twist and turn, and if she got in the air, she could probably match a modern passenger jet for speed, but here, in this cavern, unable to get too high or too far without smashing into the roof of the cavern or into its walls, there was a limit to how quickly she could maneuver.

Jeanne Alter landed on her shoulder, and then went further up and climbed the back of the scaly neck. The evil fairy thrashed and tried to throw her off, but couldn’t, because Jeanne Alter just stabbed her sword into the scales to keep herself steady and attached and used it like an ice ax. No matter how hard the evil fairy tried, tossing her head back to and fro, flapping her wings in some vain effort to smack her loose, Jeanne Alter clung on and kept going.

Eventually, she reached the head, and she reached out to take hold of each of the pair of crooked horns.

“Now,” she commanded, “heel, you ginormous bitch!”

But it didn’t work, not completely. The evil fairy fought the order with everything she had, massive body twitching and muscles bulging as she forced herself to move as though wading through molasses. It seemed to take enormous effort to do just that much, like her whole body was being weighed down by gravity and she was struggling to keep her bulk from collapsing in on itself. Her huge jaw worked, sparks of flame wafting from out of her throat and the corners of her mouth, but never building back up again to a full blast.

How long would it last, I had to wonder. The evil fairy wasn’t enough of either a fairy or a dragon to be completely controlled, and as long as she could continue to draw on more power from the Grail, she might be able to force the issue by releasing a huge burst of energy to throw Jeanne Alter off.

With a gasp, Mash let Lord Chaldeas fade, panting as her arms shook.

“That’s not going to hold her forever,” I said.

“It just needs to hold her for long enough, right?” Ritsuka countered.

“It may not,” Flamel warned. “If she has been clever enough to manage as much as she has, then once she has calmed down, she will contrive a method of escape. It may be as simple as transforming back into her natural form.”

And there was no telling if she didn’t have some sort of spell set up to hurt Renée that she could use the instant she had her wits back about her. I should have considered that sooner, because she very well might have put something in place to punish us if we pushed our luck or the odds started to turn against her.

“Wait!” said Rika. “Wait, wait, wait! I think I know how to kill her!”

“Uhn?”

Ritsuka shook his head. “We aren’t trying to kill her —”

“For good, I mean!” Rika clarified. “Look, the dragon thing isn’t something she can do in the OG fairy tale, right? That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

“The evil fairy doesn’t even have a name in the original story,” Andersen told her.

Rika nodded. “Then the rest of this, it’s all stuff she can do because Disney added onto her, isn’t it? In that case…!”

She could be killed the same way as she died in the movie?

My first reaction was to deny it. The literary purist in me didn’t even want to entertain the idea. But when I put that first instinct aside…

“Maybe,” was all I said.

“We’ve got nothing to lose by trying,” said Arash.

We really didn’t.

“Go for it, Rika.”

Her grin was bright enough to light up her face.

“Mo-chan! Come quick!” she called over to Mordred.

Mordred jogged back over to us, keeping an eye on the struggling evil fairy as she did, and when she reached us, she said, “What? Make it quick. That don’t look like it’s gonna keep.”

“I need you to do your best knight errant impression!” Rika said swiftly. “I’m gonna say an incantation, and then I need you to throw your sword straight at Maleficent’s heart!”

Mordred did a double-take, eyeing Rika with utter bewilderment. “Throw my sword? You outta your mind?”

“Just trust me!” Rika insisted.

She had some obvious reservations about it, but reluctantly, Mordred did as Rika said and held out her sword, waiting as she watched the evil fairy strain. Rika held her hands out to the blade of Mordred’s Clarent, fingers splayed as though she was about to deliver a blessing.

“Sword of truth, fly swift and sure,” she breathed out, “that evil may die and good endure!”

Mordred did another double-take. “What?”

Rika just pointed at the dragon. “Throw it!”

Mordred hesitated another second, and then, as the evil fairy drew back, groaning and shaking its head, pulled her arm back, braced herself, and threw her sword like a javelin.

Against all sense and reason, it flew straight, tip first, and pierced the dragon’s heart.

The reaction was immediate: the dragon reared back, the paws of its front legs grasping desperately at the wound even though they were too large to grip the much smaller sword, and a loud, agonized roar ripped out of its throat, half massive, furious beast and half dying, tortured woman. The cavern around us shook with the sound, vibrating, and for a second, I thought all we had accomplished was to make her even angrier than she had been.

And then the dragon fell, collapsing as though all its strings had been cut, and landed with a weighty thud on the cavern floor, sending the ground beneath us to trembling. It laid there limply, eyes closed and acid green tongue lolling out of its mouth, as a large pool of purple blood slowly grew beneath it.

Just as she had been in the movie, the evil fairy had been defeated.