Chapter CLVII: King of the Storm

Pillars of fire shot up around Barbatos’s bulk, expanding, twisting, and as they reached the ceiling, the steam above ignited, too, in a whoosh of flames that cast a bright light across the entire cavern. Down below, on the ground, we were buffeted by waves of hot air that blew our hair all about, but with the mist much thinner around us, the magical energy wasn’t dense enough to cause a chain reaction.

Embarrassingly, I’d forgotten about the fact that denser mist exploded on contact with Jeanne Alter’s flames. It wasn’t, however, as though we’d had a plethora of options for taking Barbatos down, so even if I’d remembered, I might have tried it anyway.

Whether or not the additional energy from the fog boosted Jeanne Alter’s Noble Phantasm, there was no way for us to know. The twisting tornado of fire swelled and condensed and spun, and over the roar of the flames and the howl of the igniting steam, it was impossible to hear the squelch of the cursed stakes stabbing into Barbatos, but I couldn’t imagine them doing much damage on their own. It was the fire I’d been counting on to begin with.

For several long seconds, Barbatos burned, and I squinted through my lenses, watching the dancing flames, eyes searching for the slightest hint of a counterattack — but it never came.

And then the Noble Phantasm petered out. The pillar of fire died from the bottom up, lifting towards the ceiling like a curtain rising on the next act, until all that was left were a few flickering embers that licked at the rock and dirt above us before finally winking out. In their wake stood Barbatos, a charred husk of what he’d been before, the leathery outer flesh seared away and the raw, red inner flesh blackened. Many of the eyes had burst and melted either through the sheer heat or from a combination with the stakes that had pierced through them from below.

But he was still there, still standing. Even as I watched, his wounds were slowly healing, the burns steadily being replaced by what counted for healthy flesh. The eyes reconstituted one by one. It was still not as fast as Flauros or Forneus had been, hooked up to a Grail as both of those were when we fought them, nor even as fast as Herakles had healed when he resurrected, but what he lacked in speed, he made up for in stamina.

“POINTLESS,” Barbatos rumbled. In spite of his rough shape, his voice still boomed. “NO MATTER HOW SPIRITED YOUR RESISTANCE, IT IS ULTIMATELY FUTILE. EVEN IF YOU DEFEAT ME, YOU WILL HAVE ACCOMPLISHED NOTHING. YOU HAVE ALREADY LOST, CHALDEA, AND NO AMOUNT OF STRUGGLING WILL AVAIL YOU.”

His eyes swiveled about, and each one focused on a different Servant, flashing with surges of magical energy. Explosions ripped across the cavern, a staccato of cracks and booms as Barbatos nipped at our Servants’ heels with his massive Mystic Eyes. He chased them around, firing off one blast after another, but his wounds hampered him to some degree, because he only rarely scored a hit, and when he did, it was fairly easily ignored.

Magic Resistance was such a convenient skill.

He wound up targeting us a few times, too, but Mash blocked them effortlessly with her shield. However little they could do to our Servants, I had no doubt that us squishy human Masters would be killed or maimed by a direct hit, and I was in no hurry to prove it.

Well, that didn’t work, Jeanne Alter told me. It came across as an accusation. What now, Master? He’s still flapping his gob and tossing his firecrackers all over the place.

It wasn’t like we’d run out of options just because her Noble Phantasm hadn’t worked. We just needed to deal more damage before he could completely recover from his wounds — run down his stamina by preventing him from regaining his strength. Just like the previous two Demon Gods, this one looked like it was a battle of attrition.

Aífe, I said instead of addressing Jeanne Alter directly. How long?

Not long, she answered me simply. I only need to finish placing the runes.

So we just had to buy her time to do that.

I yoked the bonds of my other Servants again, ignoring the brief moment of disorientation and reaching all of them simultaneously. We need to buy time for Aífe to set up her Noble Phantasm. Keep his attention off of her until then.

Dunno if you noticed, but the last one didn’t do much, Mordred responded.

It’s making him waste energy to heal himself, I told her. The more damage we do, the quicker he’ll burn through what he has and turn back into Zolgen.

If you say so. She didn’t sound like she really believed me, but if she had any better ideas, she wasn’t sharing.

They dove back into the fighting, getting up close and hacking away at whatever parts of Barbatos were within reach. Like before, it wasn’t much, because Barbatos was simply too big to be meaningfully hurt by an ordinary-sized sword, no matter how much strength was put behind it, and the ranged support from Emiya and Arash wasn’t doing that much either. That was what I’d expected, though. The important part was that he wasn’t paying anywhere near as much attention to what Aífe was doing, only pursuing her with the same effort he was putting into the others.

It felt a little strange, honestly. We were doing our best with what we had available under the circumstances, because we had to worry about accidentally caving the whole place in and — ironically — protecting Angrboða while Flamel rescued Renée, but Barbatos seemed to be acting almost…perfunctorily. Like this was a job and he was only doing what he absolutely had to, not like he was honestly and truly trying his best to kill us.

“It didn’t work,” Ritsuka said. “So he really is just like the last two. That means we have to whittle him down, doesn’t it?”

“Aífe’s setting up Ochd Deug Odin,” I revealed, and he nodded like he’d been expecting that. “The others just have to keep Barbatos busy in the meantime.”

“Kinda basic,” said Rika, “but, hey, that makes it really easy to follow! Emiya!”

“I heard!” Emiya responded. “Not sure how much of his attention I have without pulling out the stuff that might get us all killed, but I’ll do what I can!”

“What he could” turned out to be mostly more of what he’d already been doing, with the addition of some carefully chosen weapons that hit a little harder, but nothing anywhere near the scale of the Caladbolg I’d seen him use several times before nor Caladbolg itself. They dealt more damage to Barbatos, eating away larger chunks of his flesh, but none of them was devastating enough to do more than whittle away at the massive pillar that was the enemy.

That was to be expected, I guess. Emiya was a versatile and powerful Heroic Spirit with an impressively vast and equally versatile collection of weapons at his disposal, but when he had to worry about killing us all by collapsing the cavern, then there was only so much he could do. If we were a mile away out in the open? Barbatos would have already been dead.

And as Emiya and Arash fired barrages of arrows, the others danced around, dodging and weaving through the detonations and the fire and cutting into Barbatos with every chance they got. Aífe, meanwhile, bounced around, steadily circling that huge body and cautiously picking moments where she wasn’t being attacked to lay down the runes needed for her Noble Phantasm. Barbatos didn’t even seem to notice what she was doing, and whether that was his own lethargic negligence or the others’ distractions at work, I wasn’t quite sure myself.

The seconds ticked by, punctuated by the sounds of the explosions from Barbatos and his mystic eyes and the squelch of his flesh being cut and pierced. Every wound inflicted upon him bled black ichor, and the pool beneath him slowly spread and seeped across the ground. In the mask, I couldn’t smell it, but the memory of the stench was seared into my nostrils, and that was enough to force my nose to wrinkle.

“You know, I’d forgotten how bad that stank,” Rika complained quietly.

“Almost makes you wish the fog down here was strong enough to cover it up,” Ritsuka agreed.

“Please don’t even joke about that, Senpai!” Mash said, strained.

The fact that they could joke about it so easily told me that they must have noticed it, too, how different this felt from the previous fights. Maybe it wasn’t my imagination, then. Maybe Barbatos really wasn’t trying as hard as he could be to snuff us all out.

At last, Aífe finished her circuit, coming back around to the front to plant the final rune. “Everyone,” she shouted, “get back! This is my —”

“DID YOU THINK I WOULDN’T NOTICE? HOW NAIVE.”

Every single one of his eyes suddenly turned towards Aífe, and they flashed a brilliant white as a surge of magical energy rose up out of nowhere. All of the concentrated power of every explosion ripped apart the same space, and although Aífe had sensed something wrong, she wasn’t fast enough to escape the entire barrage at once. It caught her before she could get clear, and her body disappeared beneath the echoing BOOM and searing light.

“Aífe!” the twins and Mash all called in concert.

Arash, I hurried to ask, is she —

Yes, he answered before I could finish, but she didn’t come out of that unscathed.

When it was over, a maroon lump laid some thirty feet away from the initial blast, an entire arm and leg missing as red blood fell sluggishly from the burnt stumps. A cool relief mixed with worry in my gut, churning into an uncomfortable mess. That hadn’t killed her, and even if it had, it wouldn’t have meant much since her main body was still back at Chaldea, but that had to hurt and there was no way she could continue fighting in that condition.

“Super Bitch!” Jeanne Alter called.

Aífe struggled to push herself up and got no farther. The damage to the rest of her was healing — courtesy of her runes, no doubt — but the arm and leg remained gone and showed no signs of restoring themselves. It would be a miracle if she could make it back over to the rest of her runic array, all the more so if she could do it without drawing Barbatos’s attention so he could finish her off.

“ADMIRABLE,” Barbatos allowed, “BUT ULTIMATELY, JUST AS POINTLESS AS ALL OF YOUR OTHER EFFORTS. ALL YOU HAVE DONE IS DELAY THE MOMENT OF YOUR DEMISE — BY NOTHING MORE THAN A SCANT FEW SECONDS.”

Once more, his eyes turned to Aífe, and I considered, for a moment, using a Command Spell to get her to safety —

“FUCK YOU!”

An enormous gout of flame struck Barbatos before I could try, washing over his one side and sending flickering sparks across the rest of him. Before the first one had even died down, a second struck, just as big and just as intense, and several of the eyes in the direct path of the fire burst open from the heat, spewing more of that black ichor to the ground.

Barbatos’s attention turned, and every eye now focused on Jeanne Alter. “IF YOU ARE DETERMINED TO OFFER YOURSELF UP FOR JUDGMENT FIRST, THEN I SHALL OBLIGE YOU, YOU ABERRANT ANOMALY.”

But before he could gather the energy to blast her the way he had Aífe, Hippolyta came upon him from the opposite side, and her fist struck him like a meteor, popping the eye she hit instantly. His entire mass was jolted by the blow, undulating as the force washed up and down from the point of impact, and for a second, I wondered if he would teeter over and fall like a tree. I wasn’t sure that he even could.

Hippolyta landed for all of a second, bracing herself against the ground, and as Barbatos swayed back towards her, she leapt up again and swung her leg around in a roundhouse kick that would have made every martial artist in every cheesy kung fu movie I’d ever seen green with envy. The smack of the collision was absolutely thunderous, echoing off of the ceiling and walls of the cavern until it sounded like she’d kicked him a hundred times at once.

Arash, I began quickly, get Aífe and take her back to where she was putting that last rune. Hurry, while the others are keeping Barbatos busy.

Got it, he replied, and then he vanished from beside me into spirit form, gone.

Unless there was some sort of serious discrepancy in power or some conceptual bullshit going on, Barbatos shouldn’t be as hard to put down as Forneus without the Grail to bolster him. Ochd Deug Odin, and maybe a second use of Jeanne Alter’s Noble Phantasm, and that would be enough to defeat the Demon God, leaving us to get whatever else we could out of Zolgen before he died.

It should be that simple. I wanted it to be that simple. But I couldn’t shake the sense that there was something going on here that I wasn’t seeing.

Hippolyta continued battering Barbatos with punches and kicks that hit with ridiculous power, her presence growing stronger and weightier with each second as her own Noble Phantasm pushed her closer and closer to the realm of the gods. Jeanne Alter hit him back with more bursts of flame, although none as big or as hot as the first two had been, leaving Siegfried to chip away at the margins and do his best not to get in their way.

Barbatos might have tried to unleash another of those powerful blasts, but he wasn’t being given the time or the chance to focus like that. The blasts he was firing kept going wide, thrown off course by the shock of Hippolyta’s blows, and instead of hitting any of his intended targets, they ignited against the far walls, the floor, and the cavern ceiling. They carved gouges into the rock and the dirt, throwing up debris that, at worst, peppered Mash’s shield.

It sounded like an artillery barrage, like something out of one of those old war movies Dad used to watch, and I had no doubt that it probably looked like that was what was happening, too, just from all of the divots that were going to be left behind when this was all said and done. I was glad, at least, that the only part of it that seemed to be bothering the twins was the noise, that they were just wincing whenever one happened a little too close and not flinching away or screaming.

And while the rest of our team kept Barbatos from mounting either a proper defense or offense, Arash hefted Aífe up, slinging the stump of her arm over his shoulder so he could half-carry her limping, hobbling form back to where she’d been about to plant that final rune.

“ENOUGH!”

A hundred explosions suddenly went off all at once in a cacophony of light and sound and force, throwing the others away from Barbatos as though they had all slammed into some sort of forcefield. They all went flying, but none of them were really hurt beyond some superficial burns and a bit of scuffing on their armor, so each of them was able to roll to their feet and bleed off the momentum effortlessly.

Barbatos wobbled and straightened, a slight, swooping curve to his body that wasn’t there before, and the eyes all flashed again, lashing out with more explosions against everyone, including us. It smashed into Mash’s shield with an echoing, reverberating GONG, and I had to grit my teeth against the sound and force my eyes not to squeeze shut reflexively, squinting against the abrupt flash.

Jeanne Alter, Hippolyta, and Siegfried were forced to dodge, all of them leaping out of the way, because each had a dozen eyes focused on them and that many blasts going off at once might not be quite so easily brushed off.

And then magical energy began to surge through the air around Barbatos as glittering lights rose up around his body, interspersed throughout the entire cavern. The memory of a similar spell flitted through my mind — and the devastation it had wrought in its wake.

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“Mash!” Ritsuka called. “Noble Phantasm!”

Mash braced herself against her shield.

“HARKEN!”

“Lord —”

“THE TIME OF THE DIVERGENCE HATH —”

“Balmung!”

Siegfried appeared suddenly in front of Barbatos mid-leap, sword lifted high over his shoulder and alight with bright, brilliant blue energy, and so swiftly that it left flickering images behind in my eyes, he swung it down.

A beam of light swept down. It carved straight through Barbatos and all of his leathery flesh, searing away everything it touched like a white hot scalpel, and when it reached the bottom, it detonated in a wave of power that gushed outwards and consumed the entirety of Barbatos’s bottom half. For a moment, a scant few heartbeats, the flash blinded us to what happened at the epicenter.

I’m sorry, Master, Siegfried told me. I’m afraid this was all I could do for you like this.

The connection snapped like a worn thread, disappearing — the shadow of Siegfried, possessing only enough energy to use his Noble Phantasm once, vanished and took the memory of this fight back to his proper self in Chaldea.

When the light faded, Siegfried was gone, as expected, and Barbatos was not, not entirely. What remained was a mangled mess, a half-melted pile of black and red and a handful of giant eyes, reduced to less than half of his original bulk. The wounds were already beginning to heal as new flesh bubbled up to take the place of what had been lost, but it wasn’t any faster than it had been earlier. Even if we left him alone, it would probably take several minutes to restore himself entirely.

Whether Barbatos was just that hardy or Siegfried had been just that rushed, I couldn’t have said.

“Damn!” said Mordred. “Motherfucker’s still not dead? What’s it take to kill this bastard, anyway?”

“This.”

Down below, barely able to sit up straight, Aífe carved the final rune she needed, and all around Barbatos, in the spots where she’d marked the previous runes, they all began to glow as their power swelled. Arash retreated as quickly as he was able, leaving her behind to activate her Noble Phantasm alone, because she was too close and too injured to survive it.

The remaining eyes all swiveled to look at her, far too late to do anything about it.

“I-INSOLENCE —”

“Ochd,” said Aífe, “Deug Odin.”

The power of the runes focused inwards and detonated like a bomb, and for the second time in less than a minute, a flash of bright, intense light filled up the cavern. The thunderous boom of the explosion rippled out and splashed against the hastily erected form of Lord Chaldeas, washing over us as a hot wind and tossing my hair about, even as the cavern around us shook as though threatening to collapse on us. I had to close my eyes against the brightness, because even my polarized lenses couldn’t filter out all of the searing light.

In the midst of it all, the thread connecting me to Aífe’s shadow disappeared, too.

When the rumbling stopped and it was safe to open my eyes again, there wasn’t much of Barbatos left. The massive pillar of flesh had been large enough to match a skyscraper, as tall as a building and at least as wide around, but in the wake of Aífe’s Noble Phantasm, what remained behind was barely big enough to have filled my old living room. The eyes, of course, were gone completely, leaving only a misshapen lump of charred black meat that was, even as I watched, slowly beginning to shrink.

“If that didn’t do it, I’m filing a complaint!” said Rika.

“With who?” her brother asked incredulously.

“I don’t know! I’ll think of something!”

Fortunately, she didn’t have to. The hunk of Barbatos that was still left was evaporating, much the same as the previous two Demon Gods had, so that combination looked to have done it. The fight was over.

Now, we just had to pry whatever information we could out of Zolgen, if he was still in good enough shape to answer a few questions before he died.

“Is it finished?” Flamel asked, and when I turned to look, he, Jekyll, and Tohsaka were climbing out of the shell of Angrboða, Renée held in his arms like a princess out of a fairytale — a fitting comparison, all things considered.

“Yes,” I said. “Renée?”

Flamel looked down at her, lips pulling into a brief grimace. “Only unconscious, thank god. She should wake up shortly, none the worse for wear.”

“And the Stone?”

He glanced at me sharply, but didn’t rebuke the question. “Still intact. Whatever method Zolgen was using to access it and enhance Angrboða, it seems to have left no permanent damage on either Renée or the Stone.”

Good news, then. It may not have been the most critically important goal that we’d come here for, but rescuing Renée was one of our goals and half the reason we’d come as quickly as we had with as little preparation as we’d done.

“What about the Grail?” asked Ritsuka, preempting my next question.

Flamel winced. “Ah, yes, well… That, I’m afraid, is somewhat more difficult a question to answer. It was not difficult to find, exactly, but extricating it from the machine without risking some kind of catastrophic failure, well…”

“Unfortunately, none of us has any idea how to remove it from the steam engine,” Tohsaka said bluntly. “Safely, at least. Flamel tried to disable the reaction creating the steam so we could just pull it out, but it didn’t really do much of anything.”

“A rather vexing limitation,” said Jekyll.

“So what?” said Mordred as she and the others gathered towards us. “Just rip the damn thing out. Ain’t that hard to do, is it?”

“Spoken like a true mindless brute,” Andersen remarked.

“British has a point,” Jeanne Alter agreed. “Can’t we just grab the thing and go? Fight’s over, so that’s all that’s keeping us in the cesspit, isn’t it?”

“It is not over yet,” Zolgen rasped. He pulled himself from what little remained of Barbatos, beaten, battered, and covered in blood and black ichor, but definitely alive.

“Bastard!” growled Mordred. “Don’t you know when to stay down and give up?”

“There should…still be…enough fog in London,” Zolgen said, voice thready. “Enough to…complete my plans.”

“Plans?” echoed Ritsuka.

Wait. He’d said something about that earlier, hadn’t he? The goal of Project Demonic Fog was to spread the steam from Angrboða not only out into London, but across the entirety of Britain, drowning everyone in the mist. He’d also mentioned something else, though, about —

“Yes,” he hissed. “Come forth, final Heroic Spirit! Come forth, King of the Storm! Come forth and fulfill your purpose on this Earth!”

“Bastard!” snarled Mordred. “Don’t you dare!”

She leapt across the distance in a flash of red lightning, sword swinging around, and Zolgen was just too slow to avoid her taking his arm straight off in a spray of blood and gore. The sheer force of it sent him spinning, but he had barely hit the ground before he was back up again. A gesture of his remaining arm made the meaty bits of Barbatos still lying about explode, transforming midair into a swarm of creatures that looked like giant hornets, and they threw themselves at Mordred.

Mordred put an arm up to protect her face as they swarmed her, but a volley of arrows from Arash took out one group and a set from Emiya tore apart the other.

But in the scant seconds it took, Zolgen continued his chant.

“Th-thou art bound in a cage of madness, and I am the summoner who holds thy chains!” he said, voice rising. “The Seventh H-Heaven clad in the great words of power —”

“Wait!” Ritsuka cried. “That’s a summoning incantation!”

“Stop him!” I ordered, and I didn’t particularly care who obeyed it.

Mordred leapt back into motion, even as Jeanne Alter raced to beat her from the opposite side. Preceding them both, Arash and Emiya both fired another volley of arrows at Zolgen, all of them center mass, and all of them devastating enough that the stump of his severed arm and an entire half of his chest disappeared in another spray of blood and viscera.

“— come forth from the Ring of Restraint, Guardian of the Heavenly scales!”

But Zolgen ignored them completely, and a scant moment before Mordred’s sword came around and lopped his head off, the final words of the incantation cut through the air like a knife, even as Zolgen’s broken body collapsed to the ground while his head went flying off into the distance.

For a long, tense moment, there was only silence as we all waited for the other shoe to drop.

“Did…” Rika began. “Did…we stop him in time?”

“That wasn’t…the full incantation,” Ritsuka reasoned.

“But he added the lines for Madness Enhancement onto the end,” I said.

“Uhn,” Fran grunted. “Uh-uhn ah uhn.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” Andersen admonished.

From behind us, Angrboða suddenly rumbled, shaking the cavern beneath our feet, and Mash gasped as we all turned to look.

“M-magical energy reaction!” she rushed to say. “Senpai, it’s a Servant summoning! The magical energy in the fog must have served as a substitute for the magic circle and the rest of the incantation!”

“That’s possible?” Tohsaka demanded incredulously.

“It’s powered by a Holy Grail!” Rika shot back. “I’m not counting anything out!”

A presence filled the cavern just as suddenly, a powerful, oppressive presence that settled around us like a heavy blanket, and the glow from inside of Angrboða intensified. From somewhere inside of it, the sound of a horse neighing echoed, bouncing off of the metal shell until it took on a haunting, unnatural quality that landed uneasily in my gut.

“What the…” Jeanne Alter began. “A fucking horse? That’s the big, bad Heroic Spirit that bastard was summoning?”

“No,” said Hippolyta. “It is nothing more than this hero’s steed. After all, both Queen Aífe and I have horses of our own, do we not?”

So this was going to be a Rider? Given our location… But, no, Zolgen had called out to the “King of the Storm,” and I’d never heard of Gawain getting that kind of epithet at any point in his life or legend. Drake, maybe? It would be ironic for us to have to face her again when she’d been our ally in the last Singularity, but there was that anecdote about her being the leader of the Wild Hunt. That…didn’t explain the horse, though. Drake was a pirate captain with a ship, not a horseman in the cavalry.

“Here they come!” Mash said urgently.

The words had barely left her mouth before a black shadow leapt out of one of the massive holes in Angrboða’s shell, a four-legged shadow with a rider astride it, arcing up through the air almost as though it could fly, even though it had no wings. The neighing echoed again, and the shadow’s arc curved down until it landed some distance away, behind where Zolgen’s corpse sat.

All of us turned to face it, our flashlights swinging around until the beams focused in on the dark shadow and revealed —

“Wait,” said Mordred, sounding unnerved. “I know that horse!”

— a horse carrying another knight in armor. Black fur, black accouterments, but a white mane and silvery armor plates. The contrast gave it a menacing look, only made worse by the wild, red eyes that gleamed beneath the sculpted helmet that protected its face. The rider, by contrast, was decked out entirely in dark colors, from dark, purplish plate that was so dark it was almost black to the black bodysuit and the black lance in their hand, jagged red spikes jutting out along its length. The armor itself had been patterned and shaped to mimic the appearance of a dragon, with the chestpiece, greaves, and gauntlets all edged in carefully crafted scales and spiky horns protruding from the back of the helm.

The dragon’s head turned to regard our group, and from the dark line of its open maw, the rider looked out at us, completely shadowed.

“That lance, too!” Mordred went on. “It can’t be…”

“Care to share with the class?” Jeanne Alter snarked.

Mordred took a step towards the new Servant and snarled, “Are you here to punish me for failing to protect your precious Britain? Huh, Father?”

“Father?” several voices parroted incredulously, unknowingly echoing my own thoughts.

It…couldn’t be, could it? That…looked nothing like the King Arthur I remembered from Fuyuki.

“Hold on!” said Rika. “Salter was shorter than me, and that lady’s gotta be almost as tall as Onii-chan!”

My eyes narrowed. Unless it wasn’t the same King Arthur. Heroic Spirits could manifest in multiple ways, depending not just on what point in their life they’d been summoned from but also what class they’d been summoned into. It was entirely possible —

Her stats bloomed in my mind’s eye as my Master’s Clairvoyance stripped the mystery bare. Lancer. In hindsight, that should have been obvious, considering she was lugging around that huge lance. In which case…

“Rhongomyniad.”

Mordred flinched. “Shit. That ain’t what I remember it looking like when it got shoved into my gut, but if that really is Father, then that’s the only thing that lance could be.”

“Is…is that really King Arthur?” Mash wondered. “She…really doesn’t look anything like the version we fought in Fuyuki.”

“Without a doubt, that’s Rhongomyniad,” Emiya said grimly, “so without a doubt, that’s King Arthur, although… You’re right, Mash. That armor, that physique, those are things the King Arthur of proper history as we know it never possessed, which would automatically mean —”

My gut twisted. “She’s from an alternate timeline.”

“One where she preferred her lance to her sword, one would assume,” said Andersen. “How twisted. And so she clung to it, even on her deathbed, and became inscribed into the Throne of Heroes as the King of the Storm, the ruler of the Wild Hunt. An unsightly ending for such a noble figure.”

“That’s a thing that can happen?” Rika demanded.

“Have you forgotten, Master?” Emiya drawled. “That El-Melloi II and I are both technically from an alternate timeline ourselves. The Throne of Heroes exists outside of time and space, and therefore every hero from every timeline exists upon it simultaneously. It’s just that the further you get from your own timeline, the harder it is to summon one of those Heroic Spirits. But harder isn’t the same thing as impossible.”

Upon her massive steed, the rider’s helmet slipped away into the aether, and a familiar face was revealed from beneath — older, leaner, more mature, but still the strikingly beautiful visage of the King Arthur we’d met in Fuyuki. She swept a yellow-eyed gaze across our entire group, taking in each of us individually without a single word, only to eventually land on Mordred, who instantly stepped back and fell into a defensive stance, sword raised. The pointed tip of her black lance, left to droop towards the ground, raised to point at us.

“Get ready!” Mordred barked at us. “There’s no talking with this one! No, that’s King Arthur, ready to slay her enemies! She’s already decided to kill us, no matter what!”

“J-just like that?” Mash squeaked. “But she hasn’t even said anything to us yet!”

“That’s right, Shieldy!” Mordred said grimly. “You can run, if you’re scared! Heh! That lance is just as powerful as Excalibur, so I wouldn’t blame you if you were scared of it! But if you turn your back to her, there’s a chance… No, you’re definitely gonna get blasted to bits!”

A sudden presence, even bigger and heavier than King Arthur’s, swept through the cavern like a gust of hot wind. Dense magical energy gathered, so thick and so intense that it was visible, swirling like a twister around Rhongomyniad and condensing down upon the surface of the lance until it glowed like a beacon of black flame. It seemed to eat the light, sucking in the beam of our flashlights, and yet it was simultaneously bright enough to cast dancing shadows around its wielder.

Mash gasped. “Massive magical energy reaction! Master, this is just like —”

“Mash!” Ritsuka ordered urgently. “Use your Noble Phantasm! Now!”

Mash didn’t hesitate. She thrust herself between us and King Arthur and slammed her giant shield into the dirt, even as Hippolyta, Jeanne Alter, and Mordred rushed to get behind it, and shouted out its name.

“Lord —”

“Rhongo,” King Arthur muttered as though chanting a curse.

“Chaldeas!”

“— myniad.”

The world ended. That was what it felt like. The swirling, condensed vortex of power that had gathered into King Arthur’s lance exploded out in our direction, blasting into the translucent rampart of Mash’s Noble Phantasm with more force and power than anything since Altera, since Saber Alter back in Fuyuki. It slammed into us like a typhoon, lashing out at the barrier with whorls of dark light that seemed as though they were trying to eat away at the brickwork.

The cavern trembled and shook around us, but it was impossible to hear over the deafening roar that drowned out every other sound. Even when I slapped my hands over my ears, it was as though the howling torrent existed on some other plane, ripping through dimensions until it reached my eardrums at full volume.

And then Lord Chaldeas began to crack, bleeding vents of black energy, and I sucked in a sharp breath.

A flash of red light from the side, and there was Ritsuka, one of his hands held out, mouth moving but the words inaudible over the commotion. In front of us, Mash braced herself, pushing one foot further back for better leverage, and the translucent barrier became more solid, more real, the cracks sealing over as though they had never been there.

The end came so suddenly that my ears rang in the aftermath, and before I knew what was happening, the torrent of power was gone and all that was left in its wake was a deafening silence. It took several seconds before I could properly hear Mash panting as Lord Chaldeas flickered and faded away.

“Ho…” Rika began. “Holy shit.”

“I’d forgotten what it’s like to be on the other end of something like that,” Emiya agreed.

“Mash!” Ritsuka said, taking several steps towards her.

“I’m…I’m okay, Senpai,” said Mash. She braced herself up against her shield. “That was…stronger than I was expecting, but thanks to your Command Spell, I-I was able to hold it off.”

“Good job, Shieldy,” Mordred praised.

A hand tugged on my sleeve, and I looked down to meet Jackie’s worried eyes. “Mommy? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Jackie,” I told her, not entirely a lie. “Just…”

Remembering what it was like to face Altera and that one, terrifying second where she was about to kill us all.

“King Arthur’s gone,” Arash announced.

A ripple of surprise washed over the group.

“Wait, what?” said Rika. “Did she just blow herself up, just like that? This wasn’t the final boss fight?”

Arash shook his head. “No.” He pointed to the side. “She left that way.”

We all turned to follow his finger and found —

“Holy…” Rika whispered for the second time in as many minutes.

— an enormous trench gouged out of the cavern. Rock, dirt, everything in the path of the blast had been scoured away, leaving an enormous trail that led back the way we’d come. It curved slowly and gently upwards, carving through the tunnel we’d entered through and then continuing on, and it left behind a massive hole large enough to sail a ship through where once all of that had been just minutes ago.

Further on, whatever else Rhongomyniad had destroyed was cast in shadow, making it impossible to see too far out, but… No, I didn’t even question it. I knew. She hadn’t just carved a path back the way we’d come through the evil fairy’s castle, she’d carved a path back up to the surface. The amount of rock she had to have chewed through to do it, the amount of damage she must have done to the city, not only to the Underground but to the houses and the streets and everything that was above us, I hadn’t seen that sort of widespread devastation caused by a single attack in over two years.

But that had to carry with it a chilling realization, one that had terrible implications for the fight we were about to get ourselves into.

“She wasn’t even aiming at us.”