Chapter CVI: Thalassocide

Drake and her crew partied long into the night, paying their respects to Emiya and Asterios in the only way they knew how, and although we indulged for a while — eating our fill so we could jump into the fight first thing in the morning and even taking a sip or two of rum to toast our fallen friends — us Masters were still the first to climb into bed that evening. We, more than the rest of them, needed our sleep so that we could be at our best, and Drake’s crew, being unable to contribute in a battle between Servants, had no such concerns, so they could keep going for as long as possible.

Rika, at least, seemed to be in better spirits. Maybe not completely back to normal yet, but some of her liveliness had returned, and if suffering through a few puns was the sacrifice I had to make for that, well, I guess I was happy enough to make it. It was good to see her bouncing back.

Fortunately for my sanity and my rest that night, after I crawled into the somewhat firm bed in the room that had been set aside for me, none of Morgan’s phantoms tried to climb in with me. I didn’t know if that was by design — if, in other words, Morgan himself had done me that kindness — or just a happy accident, but it meant that I slept through completely uninterrupted.

Considering the number of times I’d been startled awake by an enemy attack of some kind since we teamed up with Drake, that was a gift horse whose teeth I wasn’t going to inspect.

I woke up the next morning well-rested, alone in my room, with nothing but the bed, desk, and chair for company. The faint light shining feebly in through the window told me that the sun hadn’t yet risen, but it wasn’t long before it would.

Medea, later on last night, had confirmed it from Hektor: Jason was going to attack early in the morning, because he was scared of being ambushed, but he wanted to try and catch us off guard. The fact that Arash hadn’t alerted me yet, however, told me we still had time before he got here.

Sitting up in the crude, old-fashioned bed that came with the room, I swung my feet out and onto the floor. A shiver swept down my spine. Even in what felt quite a lot like a tropical zone, the temperature had still dropped overnight, and the floor was cold.

I slipped my boots on and laced them quickly, then levered myself to my feet and to the door. The hallway outside was empty, and the doors to Mash, Ritsuka, and Rika’s rooms were still shut. They must have still been asleep. I strained my ear — at some point in the night, the crew must have packed it in, too, because I couldn’t hear anyone still partying and carrying on.

Bradamante shimmered suddenly into existence. “Good morning, Master!”

“Morning,” I returned her greeting. “Anything interesting happen?”

“All quiet!” she reported. “Captain Drake’s crew got a little rowdy, but nothing she couldn’t handle! No sign of enemy activity either!”

Good. I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if Jason had tried something ambitious, like sending Caenis after us while he made his way here more slowly. Considering we had already shown we could wound her, however, maybe he wasn’t so willing to risk that we could take her out and had decided to be a bit more cautious.

Good news, she hadn’t attacked us in the middle of the night. Bad news, they hadn’t screwed up by giving us a chance to pick her off while she was alone.

“I’m going to go meet up with Arash and get ready,” I told her. “Wake up the others. There’s no telling how much time we have before Jason gets here.”

Bradamante nodded. “Understood!”

As she went to the other rooms to start waking up Mash and the twins, I went the opposite direction, feeling things out with my swarm as I made my way towards the exit.

The crew, as expected, was camped out in the courtyard and fast asleep. A few early birds were up and milling about, but most of them were passed out in their tents and sawing the metaphorical logs. The Servants, on the other hand, requiring no sleep to function and incapable of drinking themselves into a stupor, were all gathered together on the outskirts of the camp, waiting.

Once I’d gotten out of the barracks and stepped into the open air, I made my way towards them, carefully picking my way around the edges of the camp to avoid stepping on any literal toes. Euryale noticed me first, and when she looked over my direction, so did the others with her.

“Good morning!” Artemis greeted me brightly as I approached.

“Good morning,” I replied politely.

“Best one since we got here,” Orion grumbled, “because it’s probably the last one.”

And he could finally be out of that little bear body. I couldn’t begrudge him that.

“Any update from Hektor?” I asked Medea.

Her lips pressed together. “None since last night.”

A little worrying, but in this case, no news was probably good news. I imagine she would have felt it if he was discovered and killed in the middle of the night, so if he hadn’t reported in then there likely wasn’t anything to report just yet.

“Will he let us know once they’ve gotten close?”

“Yes,” she answered confidently. I didn’t have any reason to think she was wrong, so I nodded.

“How convenient,” Euryale drawled, “that we happen to have a…what is the term? A mole? On Jason’s crew.”

“For sure,” Bellamy agreed. “Man, it’s great to have a guy spying on the enemy so we can know his every move!” He shook his head. “Not that I don’t trust Arash or anything, but by the time he sees them coming, they’ll be almost right on top of us!”

Medea’s lips drew thinner. As she should have expected, no one had been particularly thrilled to find out she’d flipped Hektor and had him keep playing Jason’s lackey — Rika’s reaction had been especially vitriolic, at first, given what had happened to Emiya — but the knowledge that we likely would have had to face Jason no matter what in order to truly secure the Grail had helped to cool some tempers.

I wasn’t absolutely sure Medea was right about it, but it also wasn’t something I wanted to risk if she was. I was going to bring it up with Da Vinci once this Singularity had been resolved. Even she might not know for sure one way or the other.

Before anyone could dogpile on Medea, I decided to change the subject and bow out of the conversation.

“I’ll go touch base with Atalanta and the others. Mash and the twins should be up soon, too.”

I received a few acknowledgements from them, along with a parting, “Good luck!” from Artemis as I turned around and went back the way I came.

Atalanta and her comrades, inconveniently, had not shacked up in the same place as us. I was sure some of it was probably a lack of complete trust — I couldn’t totally blame them for it, even if it irked me — and some of it had something to do with an unwillingness to leave the Ark so unprotected for so long, but it meant I had to make the trek from the barracks back to the fort, which was an extra few minutes longer than I would have liked it to be.

Arash was also at the fort, however, because it offered him the best sight line on any approaching ships, so one way or another, I suppose I was going to have to go there anyway.

The streets, at least, didn’t have quite so many phantoms roaming them. They weren’t completely empty, and I suspected they never had been at any point throughout the night, but if the city followed the day-night cycle of the Singularity, then it only made sense that the only “people” out and about at this hour were either those who had never gone to bed or those who had to get up early for whatever job they worked.

I was glad that I didn’t run into many of them. The feeling of walking through one wasn’t any more pleasant than it had been the night before, and my bugs had not magically become capable of landing on them in the interim.

As I reached the fort, it became apparent that the other Servants, too, had stayed up the entire night, although given his reputation, I wouldn’t have put it past Morgan to have spent the whole time drinking, whether he could technically get drunk or not. His alcoholism had driven him into his grave, after all.

Expectedly, he was lounging in an officer’s quarters, chair kicked back, feet on top of the desk, and nursing a tankard of something sweet that was probably rum. Whether he’d been that way all night, I couldn’t say, and I didn’t particularly care beyond idle curiosity. As long as he would be ready to fight when the time came.

King David remained near the Ark, standing guard over it, if I had to guess. I wasn’t sure if he expected us to try and steal it or try and use it, or if he was just nervous about it in general. If I had to put money on it, I would have said the latter, and I didn’t entirely blame him. I think his Ark of the Covenant was the first Noble Phantasm I’d yet seen that broke the ranking scale Chaldea used to measure their power.

Atalanta prowled the upper floors, pacing from room to room like a lioness inspecting her territory. Whether or not she expected to find anything out of place, I couldn’t have said. It may just have been her way of dealing with the anxiety and pressure of a looming battle, or it could have been some kind of ritual she engaged in.

Hippolyta, on the other hand, had chosen a room to herself and seemed to be going through an early morning workout. She seemed like she would be the easiest to approach, so I decided I would head towards her first.

Anything? I asked Arash as I stepped in through the front door.

No sign of them yet, he replied. But if the Argo can fly, too…

I grimaced. Then we might not see them coming until they literally dropped out of the sky. Worse, the cloud cover was overcast, so if they went high enough, then not even Arash would be able to see them until they dropped beneath it. They would catch us almost completely off guard.

We’ll just have to rely on Hektor to let us know, I said. But for good measure, Don’t let your guard down. I’d rather not put too much trust in the guy that tried to kill me, no matter how much he half-assed it.

Understood, Arash said.

With that handled, I made my way through the fort, walking through the corridors and down the halls made of brick and stone lit by candles and torches burning with open flames. Even here, there were a few phantoms, although not nearly as many as there had been on the streets last night. Could Morgan actually control them to some degree or another?

A shocking thought followed on the heels of that question: could he use them the same way I used my bugs? Could he “see” through them, use their sense of “touch” to feel out where things were?

My lips pursed. He would never tell me, would he? And why would he? If the phantoms themselves couldn’t interact with anyone, then the only use they could have was sensory, and letting anyone at all know risked the chance that the information would spread and any advantage he might have had would disappear.

It seemed he was even cleverer than I originally gave him credit for.

When I reached the heavy wooden door to the room where Hippolyta had sequestered herself away, I lifted a hand and rapped my knuckles on it firmly. There was a moment’s pause, a few seconds where I couldn’t do anything but stand there, and then —

“Come in!”

The door opened without trouble, and Hippolyta turned to face me fully as I entered the room. A thin sheen of sweat beaded her forehead and clung to her face, but she looked no less lively than when I’d first met her the day before. I had the feeling she and Aífe would either get on swimmingly or not at all.

“Can I help you?” she asked politely.

“We need to finish preparing,” I told her without preamble. “Jason and the Argo should be coming soon, so we have to be ready to fight before then.”

A solemn mask fell across her face. Her expression could have been carved from stone. “I take it you would like me to gather the others for you?”

“Yes. I want to go over the plan one last time, then get everyone into position. We can’t afford any mistakes.”

She nodded. “Very well. Where were you intending to conduct this final meeting?”

A jerk of my head gestured over my shoulder, towards the towering curtain wall outside that housed the cannons. “The battlements. It’ll give everyone the best view of where things are and what will be where.”

Hippolyta dipped her head again. “I understand. Your comrades? They’re to be joining us, correct?”

“Still waking up,” I said. “Bradamante will be bringing them along shortly.”

As the words left my mouth, I reached out along the thread that connected me to Bradamante and told her, Once they’re all awake, gather the others and bring them to the fort, up to the battlements. We’re meeting there.

Understood! Bradamante replied crisply.

“Then I will see to Atalanta, King David, and Captain Morgan,” said Hippolyta. “Though…if you don’t mind my asking…”

I arched an eyebrow. “Something you want to know?”

Her lips pursed.

“You say that you have done this three times before, correct? That this is the fourth of these…Singularities?” she asked.

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“Yes.” And there would still be four more after it.

Her brow furrowed a little. “Then tell me honestly, if you would: is this to be your most difficult battle yet?”

All of the ones before raced through my mind. Medusa, Emiya Alter, Saber Alter, Saint Martha, Dracul, Fafnir, Jeanne Alter — even if I stopped at the end of Orléans, there had been a number of enemies that had pushed us, that had come closer than I would have liked to killing at least one of us. Very few of our battles had been in any way easy, and even those had posed their own sorts of challenges.

And if I started including my career as a cape, well… It really wasn’t any kind of contest.

“No.”

“I see.” Hippolyta let out a little breath as some of the tension in her shoulders eased. “I’m glad. To have found allies so experienced, it’s more than I would have hoped for.”

When we left the room, we went our separate ways, and Hippolyta headed deeper into the fort while I made my way towards the curtain wall and the nearest set of stairs that would take me up atop it. Not for the first time and probably not for the last, a little jolt of surreality flitted through my stomach as I walked, taking in the brick walls and the Elizabethan era furnishings, because I was in Port Royal, scaling the walls of one of its forts. I was, technically, in the year 1573.

I even had a Spanish doubloon, freshly minted, sitting in my pocket.

Arash was already up there and waiting, and he turned to me with a slight smile as I walked over to join him. One of my hands came to rest on one of the wall’s teeth — crenellations, I would later learn was the proper term — and the brick was rough beneath my fingertips, as though it was freshly laid.

Down below, the rest of the town stretched out. I was high enough I could see the barracks, although not so high I could see over it and into the courtyard where Drake’s crew had set up camp. Over at the docks, the Golden Hind had been repaired and fixed up, looking not quite as good as new, but in much better shape than she had been just the night before. Between the small team Drake had sent to keep an eye on things and the phantoms Morgan had supplied, they’d managed to do that all in a single night.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Arash asked. My mouth twitched, threatened to smile.

“All I’ve got on me is a doubloon.” Although that wasn’t quite how that phrase worked, was it? “Just…had a thought. My best friend, she would never believe some of the stuff that’s happened these last few months.”

The last few years, really. Meeting Da Vinci alone would have been enough to throw Lisa for a loop.

“It does strain credulity,” Arash agreed. “Just a little bit, though.”

A huff of air escaped my nostrils. It might one day have grown up into a snort.

“This friend of yours,” he went on. “I think I’d like to meet her one day.”

“I…” Something leaden dropped into my stomach. “Don’t think that’ll be possible.”

For either of us.

Arash didn’t judge, he just made a soft noise in the back of his throat. “Shame.”

Soon enough, Hippolyta had gathered up her allies and brought them out to join us, and it wasn’t long after that before Bradamante led the procession of the twins, Mash, Drake, Bellamy, Artemis, Medea, and Euryale up through town and towards the fort. In another situation, it might have been funny exactly how mismatched they were, because none of them looked like they belonged in the same time period, let alone the same place.

Somehow, we managed to group up together atop that curtain wall with more than enough space for everyone to stand comfortably, arranged in a vague oval shape.

“Can’t Jason come back later?” Rika mumbled tiredly, rubbing at one eye with her palm. “It’s way too early for this…”

Ritsuka looked like he agreed, and even Mash seemed a little bit sluggish.

If we still had Emiya, he might have been able to whip up a pot of coffee.

“Alright,” I said firmly, and the twins straightened a little, as though my voice itself was enough to wake them up. “Let’s go over this one more time.” I nodded over at Medea. “Thanks to Medea, Hektor will be able to give us advance warning of exactly when we should expect Jason and the others. No news?”

“None,” said Medea. “They aren’t yet close enough for him to notify me.”

“Which means we have a little more time,” I went on. “When they get here, here’s how we’re going to do this. First, Arash, Artemis, and Atalanta will engage with a barrage of arrows. The goal will be to keep Herakles, the other Medea, and Jason confined to the Argo — if Jason can’t risk leaving Herakles’ protection, he won’t have any choice but to send Caenis on her own.”

“Leaving her vulnerable,” Ritsuka added.

I nodded. “Exactly. While Atalanta keeps them pinned, Arash, at that point, will use Captain Drake’s Grail and defeat Caenis. She shouldn’t be expecting anything he fires at her to do anything, so she isn’t likely to bother dodging.”

“I won’t miss,” Arash promised.

“Neither will I,” Atalanta agreed.

“From there,” I continued, “we need to convince them to come further in. Atalanta, Arash, Artemis, once Caenis is taken care of, give them a reprieve, enough space to think we’re retreating. As soon as the Argo is inside the archipelago, Captain Morgan, I need you to use your Noble Phantasm and bombard them. If you can, I want you to take one of Herakles’ lives, but even if you can’t, sink the Argo. Force them to come onto land, where we’ll have the home field advantage.”

Morgan smirked. “I do believe I can manage such a thing.”

As long as we got them off of their ship, that was the part that mattered. If they didn’t have a method of fleeing the fight, then we shouldn’t have to worry about them cutting and running the instant things looked bad.

“Once they’re on land,” I gestured to us Masters, “we’ll summon in Aífe and Siegfried and engage Herakles. With them to help, we’ll take as many of his lives as we can — every one of us who thinks they have a shot at killing him at least once, take it. If it’s enough, we should be able to take care of Jason without any trouble. If it’s not —”

I pointed to the main building, where the Ark was hidden, deep inside the basement.

“— we’ll retreat into the fort and lure Herakles towards the Ark, and one way or another, make him touch it. However it works out, Herakles will be dealt with and Jason will be vulnerable. It should be a simple matter of securing the Grail at that point.”

“And then this Singularity will be resolved,” Mash concluded.

“An effective plan,” Hippolyta noted with something like approval. “However, if Jason should decide to flee once Caenis has been defeated, what then?”

If he didn’t take our bait, she meant. I didn’t think it likely, but Jason had never been known or famous for his bravery. Frankly, I didn’t remember a single part of his myth where he’d ever had to do anything braver than listening to his wife.

So if he really decided to let his cowardice rule him, in spite of having Herakles there to protect him…

I turned to Bellamy. “Then we’ll need you to sink the Argo.”

He grinned. “Yeah, I can do that. Sure beats sitting around here and twiddling my thumbs while all the action is happening!”

A brief flash of jealousy stabbed at my gut, but I didn’t give it a chance to take root.

“The rest of us are support. Our job is to make sure the others can do their jobs —”

Medea suddenly stiffened, her back ramrod straight, her eyes widening as her mouth slackened, and she whirled about, looking towards the horizon, where the first rays of sunlight were starting to paint the sky in shades of pink and gold. She didn’t need to open her mouth for me to know what had caught her attention.

“They’re here,” she whispered, confirming what I already knew. It couldn’t have been anything else to begin with.

“Shit!” said Drake, summarizing what we all must have been thinking.

“Everyone, get into position!” I ordered. “No time to waste — go!”

They didn’t quite scramble — the only one who was going anywhere anytime soon was Bellamy, who needed to be ready to cut Jason off and sink the Argo — but the huddle did break as our Archers positioned themselves along the front wall of the fort, bows at the ready. Everyone else either stepped back a little or, like me, joined them to look out towards the ocean.

If nothing else, I thought, I had to give Jason some credit for approaching where and when he was. The sunrise made it difficult to look towards him, so I had to slant my gaze downwards a little and squint to avoid being blinded. It made him nearly invisible against the glare.

“What I wouldn’t give for a pair of sunglasses,” Rika muttered as she did the same.

Emiya probably would have been happy to make some for us, I didn’t say. I wondered if she was thinking it, too. If she was blaming herself again. If she was, she wasn’t showing it.

“Oi, Arash.” Drake reached for her cleavage and retrieved her Grail in a sparkle of golden light, to the surprised goggling of our new allies, who hadn’t seen her do it yet. “You’ll be needing this little bauble, yeah?”

“Yeah.” He accepted it with a slight smile. “I’ll be sure to take good care of it.”

Drake grunted. “Long as it does its job, I don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to it afterward.”

The minutes passed slowly, long and filled with tension. On the horizon, as the sun climbed upwards at a torturous pace, the vague form of a distant ship slowly described itself against the surface of the ocean as little more than a muted splinter of dark color against the shimmering yellow.

“That’s them,” Arash said confidently.

I closed one eye, pushing my mind down the thread connecting me to Arash, and my head nearly spun from the disorientation of looking through both my own eye and his simultaneously. From having such radically different qualities of vision. Seeing from multiple perspectives was something familiar to me, though, so after a brief second to adjust, I got used to having his much sharper vision on one side and my much more limited vision on the other.

In the distance, the shard of color resolved into a ship, a familiar galley that I had first seen just a day ago, with five Servants standing upon the deck. Jason, Medea the younger, Caenis, Herakles, and Hektor, all accounted for. This time, no one was out sneaking up on us.

“He really did summon Caenis and Herakles,” Atalanta muttered.

I pulled myself back along the connecting thread and opened my closed eye. It really was ridiculous how much better Arash could see than me, even ignoring my need for prescription lenses.

“That’s them,” Rika said quietly. Her hands curled into fists, knuckles a stark white.

The Argo moved with impossible speed for a regular ship, but it still took quite some time for it to cross the distance and get closer, close enough that we could actually start to make out the shape of the mast and the sails jutting up from the deck, and it felt like forever before it reached the shallows just outside of the archipelago. Even there, they were still technically several miles out from us and far enough that my eyes just weren’t good enough to see the individual people on it.

But it was more than close enough for our purposes.

“Now.”

Arash pulled back on his bowstring, nocking an arrow, and Artemis and Atalanta both followed his lead, nocking their own arrows. A moment later, they fired, and fired, and fired again, so rapidly that I saw nothing but a blur as an enormous volley of arrows flew up into the sky like rain in reverse. It was not the ten-thousand strong volley Arash had once boasted he was capable of, not even close, but it was definitely in the hundreds.

When they came down, they came down on that one spot, converging upon the Argo as though it had its own personal rain cloud. I couldn’t hear him, I couldn’t see him, but I could definitely imagine Jason’s panicked squawking as he and Medea the younger were pulled in by Herakles so he could protect them. Unfortunately, I could also imagine those arrows breaking against that leaden skin, splashing off of him like simple rain, completely ineffectual. Useless against his Noble Phantasm.

But that was fine, that was part of the plan.

“Keep going.”

Between the three of them, they did, firing staggered volleys of arrows that soared up into the sky and came back down on the Argo, all aimed at Jason, and by proxy, Herakles. There was no break, no moment of reprieve, because they didn’t stop firing, not even for a second, and arrow after arrow left their bows with inhuman, mind-boggling speed. It reminded me of a video I had once seen of Miss Militia using a machine gun.

All the while, Jason could do nothing except cower beneath Herakles’ protection, waiting for an end to a rain of arrows that wasn’t going to come. If he stepped one foot out from under Herakles, he would be killed instantly.

“This almost feels like bullying,” Ritsuka murmured.

“They deserve it,” Rika said pitilessly.

Medea seemed to agree with her, because a cruel smile was pulling at the corners of her lips. Like she was enjoying Jason’s suffering.

She probably was.

I refused to blink, watching, waiting for the moment when Jason finally decided he’d had enough and sent Caenis out. Once he did, we could start the next part of the plan.

I wasn’t expecting the sea in front of the Argo to suddenly rise up into an enormous wall of water.

“What?” Rika squeaked.

“Caenis!” Medea snarled. “It’s her Noble Phantasm!”

She had more than one?

“She’s going to try and drown us out!” Atalanta warned.

The wall of water was growing large enough that I was willing to believe it. Twenty feet, thirty, forty, and it wasn’t stopping. Maybe because it was in the shallows of the archipelago, it was even easier to make it bigger than it would have been out at sea.

“Is she mad?” Orion squawked. “She won’t just kill all of us, she’ll kill Euryale, too!”

With her Madness Enhancement so high, I wasn’t sure she would have cared either way. I doubted even Jason could reason with her when she set her mind to something.

Drake threw herself against one of the crenellations. “BOMBE!”

But he was too far away to hear her, and even if he did, there wouldn’t be anywhere near enough time for him to get to safety. I wasn’t sure we could, even if we hunkered down inside the fort. That wave might just sweep us all away, too, and scour the city down to the bedrock. It looked like it came straight out of a disaster movie.

Fuck. Even if we killed her before she could send it our way, that much water settling back down would still flood most of the island.

I whirled about. “Mash!”

“By my Command Spell!” But Ritsuka was already a step ahead of me. “Mash, use your Noble Phantasm to stop that wave!”

“Yes, Master!”

Mash kicked off the wall like she’d been shot from a cannon, soaring like a meteor down towards the edge of the town. She moved like she had a pair of rockets strapped to her waist, crossing the distance with a speed I hadn’t known she could possess, and she positioned herself at the end of the outermost terrace, overlooking the water below — just in time for that gigantic wall, easily a hundred feet high, to turn into a wave.

So loudly that I could hear it from here, she shouted, “LORD CHALDEAS!”

The familiar rampart formed, translucent and blue and towering, a comically small wall that was supposed to hold off an enormous tidal wave big enough to consume the whole island. It wouldn’t be enough on its own. Even if it could stop some of it, the rest of the wave would flow around that rampart and take out everything behind her anyway.

My vision flickered. For an instant, I thought I saw a looming shadow in the midst of that wall. In my ear, a small, tinny voice announced, “Wave.”

“Mash!” the twins called, and they both held out a hand, ready to use another Command Spell each to reinforce her.

Except Mash let out a scream, a loud cry filled with determination, and I felt my eyebrows start to rise as the single rampart stretched out, growing, becoming taller and wider as it transformed into a colossal curtain wall that reached from one side of the town to the other. Still shimmering, still glowing, still incomplete, but more than it had been just a second ago.

Rika gasped. “That’s…!”

“Just like against Romulus,” Ritsuka breathed.

Not quite. But it was closer than not. Not as solid or as firm as it had been then, not as real, but sitting right on the cusp of it.

“Don’t let up!” I ordered our Archers. “Arash, the instant Caenis leaves the Argo —”

“Got it!” he replied.

The looming wave surged. The water roared. With all of the unstoppable, ponderous weight a wave that size possessed, it came upon our island, dwarfing the town, dwarfing the fort, dwarfing the hill that fort was built upon, and it crashed down onto Lord Chaldeas with crushing, explosive force and power.

It felt like the world was ending. The entire island seemed to shudder and quiver under the assault, and the ground beneath our feet rumbled like a groaning giant. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the brick and mortar we were standing on started to shake itself apart, or if the island itself had started to buckle beneath the torture it was being put through.

But it held. Lord Chaldeas held. The wave thundered down upon that towering wall in a torrent of sound and water, trying its damnedest to wash her away, to sweep her and the rest of us into the deep and drown us all, but she planted her feet and refused. She wouldn’t be moved. She wouldn’t be washed away. She wouldn’t let us die.

And as though it was her will made manifest, Lord Chaldeas turned that determination into reality.

It couldn’t have lasted more than a handful of seconds, but it seemed like so much longer. All of that water, the entirety of that wave, it expended itself on the surface of Lord Chaldeas and flowed gently around it, passing our island right on by. There was nothing to show for it except a brief rise in the sea level, and even that tapered off and returned to normal.

“By the gods,” Atalanta whispered, “she actually did it!”

Drake laughed, delighted. “Fuck yeah! That was fucking amazing!”

The twins both breathed sighs of relief. “Thank goodness,” Ritsuka said, sounding like he was the one who had just held back the enormous tidal wave.

“M-man,” Rika said shakily, “that was way too close! I thought we were goners for sure!”

“It’s not over yet,” I reminded them all. “Don’t let your guard down.”

The mood instantly sobered again. “Right!” the twins said.

Spent, Lord Chaldeas flickered and vanished. Behind it, Mash sagged against her shield, panting breathlessly from the effort like she had just run a marathon.

It did not go unnoticed.

A rocket took off from the Argo in a spray of water and a burst of raw energy, so fast that I could only see the trail it left behind in its wake. Before I could even open my mouth, it slammed into Mash like a runaway train, and we all heard her startled scream as she was sent flying backwards into the nearest house. It collapsed on top of her like cheap plywood.

“Mash!” Ritsuka shouted.

Down below, Caenis resolved into existence like a splash of seafoam, spear extended, and she wound it back, getting ready for another attack.

It was the best opening we were going to get.

Arash! I barked mentally.

As though he had read my mind, he swiped up the Grail that Drake had given him and took it into his body, and in one smooth motion, so fast that it all seemed to happen simultaneously, he nocked an arrow, pulled back on the bowstring, and let it fly, aimed straight at the enemy’s heart.

Caenis, believing he couldn’t hurt her, didn’t even bother to try dodging it. She didn’t even spare it the attention to look away from the building she had flung Mash through, that was how sure she was of her invincibility.

That was why she was utterly shocked when it punched straight through her chest in a spray of red blood.