Chapter CVII: Final Labor
Caenis staggered. For a moment, caught up in her surprise, she didn't react beyond it, like she couldn't believe that Arash actually managed to injure her. She was stuck staring down at the arrow as though it was some strange, foreign thing that she'd never seen before, even as blood slowly began to spread across the pristine white of her clothing.
Arash didn't pass up the opportunity she was giving him. Lightning fast, he fired off another brace of arrows at her, and when Caenis finally reacted, turning to throw herself to the side and out of the way, it wasn't fast enough — one sank into her belly, another into her arm, a third into her leg, her heel, her shoulder, between her ribs and into a lung, and instead of landing upright and ready to keep fighting, she tripped over and fell to the ground.
By some miracle, she managed to manifest a shield with enough time to protect herself from another volley, but the damage had already been done. The first arrow was already a killshot, even if she was holding on through sheer stubbornness, and the others just chipped away at any remaining strength she might have had. Even when she stumbled back to her feet, hacking up mouthfuls of blood, it was already over.
That was why, when Mash charged out of the pile of wood that had once been a house and slammed into Caenis with her shield, Caenis couldn't do anything except be thrown backwards into the water and sink like a rock. A splotch of maroon marked where she'd fallen like some kind of twisted gravestone, spreading slowly.
If I hadn't gotten a good enough look at her Poseidon Blessing to know that she didn't get any special healing powers in the water, I might have worried that Mash had just undone all of that effort. Even still, I was going to have to say something to her later about how that could come back to bite us in the ass. For now, though, no — the only question was whether or not we'd done enough damage to put her down, or if she still had enough strength left to pull herself up and keep fighting.
Several long seconds passed waiting, several long seconds of baited breath, but Caenis never resurfaced, and the splotch of maroon started to fade as it dissipated into the water. A weight lifted from my shoulders.
One down. Now we just had to hope the fight against Herakles went as smoothly.
"Next phase!" I told everyone. "Rika, I'll leave bringing Aífe here to you!"
"Aye, aye, Senpai!" Rika chirped.
"Ritsuka, get Mash back up here!"
"On it!" he replied, and then his brow furrowed as he reached along his connection to Mash to call her back.
Like clockwork, our Archers stopped firing and stepped back away from the crenellations a few feet as Mash turned away from the water and raced back towards the fort, fast enough to look like a retreat but slow enough that Jason would be able to tell where she was going. For a moment, it looked like he wouldn't take the bait, because the Argo remained where it was and wasn't moving. The order to have Morgan bombard them anyway while we still had the chance waited on the tip of my tongue.
But then Jason started shouting something that I couldn't hear, and I didn't need Medea's grimace to know that none of it was pleasant and probably some portion of it was aimed in her direction, or at least at her younger self. The rest, no doubt, was reserved for us and hurling insults our way, and considering how long his screed was going on for, he was either very creative or very repetitive.
The most impressive part was honestly the fact that we could hear him at all, considering how far away he still was. The one thing he could definitely claim as his own was the set of lungs he happened to have on him.
Whatever the case, the content of his shouting didn't matter so much as the fact that the Argo jolted into motion and came further into the archipelago, and I watched it make its way closer, waiting for it to get far enough in to close the rest of the trap in around them. By some miracle — whether it was arrogance or sloppiness, I didn't particularly care — they didn't even seem to notice the cannons on the forts stationed on the outer islands.
Maybe he thought they were mundane cannons and therefore nothing to worry about, or maybe he thought that more modern weapons wouldn't be able to sink his ship. Either way, his mistake was to our advantage, so I didn't question it too deeply.
Mash made it back around then. She scaled the fort's walls with a single superhuman leap and landed among the group effortlessly.
"I'm back, Master," she told Ritsuka dutifully. "No injuries to report!"
"Great job, Mash," said Ritsuka.
"You were amazing!" his sister added.
"Gotta admit, I wasn't expecting that to go so smoothly," Orion said, crossing his arms. "Against those guys, no plan should survive contact with the enemy."
"That may be why it did," Atalanta chimed in. "If Jason believes so completely that they're untouchable, then it is very easy for him to fall into a trap that plays upon it."
"He's an amateur," Drake said, grinning savagely. "Ain't no true self-respecting pirate would forget that anything could go wrong at sea at any damn moment!"
Out on the water, Jason and the Argo sailed past the outer islands and into the archipelago proper, and without even realizing it, they put themselves directly where we wanted them to be. I waited only until the rear of the Argo cleared the last stretch of those outermost islands, and then I turned to Morgan.
"Captain Morgan."
He grinned. "Guess that's my cue, aye? Alright, then. Let's get this party started!"
He stepped forward, and like something out of a commercial for the rum bearing his name, he planted one foot atop a crenellation, rested an arm atop his raised knee, and threw the other forward in the Argo's direction.
Sequential Military Bombardment"Port Royal Cannonade!"
With a hiss, the fuses on all of the cannons built into the walls beneath our feet lit.
"Fire!"
BOOM
The whole world seemed to shake.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM
One after the other, the cannons fired, not just from the walls beneath us but from each of the forts on each of the islands around us. They belched smoke and flame and cannonballs the size of my head, and the raw force behind their firing seemed to set the ground beneath our feet aquiver. I wouldn't have been surprised if the bricks started cracking apart at the mortar.
And ahead of us, the Argo had nowhere to go. It was bombarded from every angle and every side, leaving it nowhere to escape, nowhere to flee beneath the rain of thick iron munitions heavy enough to blow a hole in a modern battleship.
Barriers rose up to intercept the cannonballs, but they shattered like cheap glass beneath the bombardment, ineffective. Medea the younger's attempt at defending them, no doubt. I watched, refusing to let myself blink, as holes opened up on the ship, as chunks of wood went flying every which way, as splinters spun off into the shallows, as one cannonball got particularly lucky and smashed into the main mast. It fell, sail and all, like a towering oak that had just been chopped down, and the crack of it crashing into the deck was drowned out by the booming staccato of yet more cannonballs being fired.
More and more holes opened up on the Argo, and it was only a matter of time before they were close enough to the waterline for the ship to start taking on water. Even that might not have been enough to take down something with that much history and mystery behind it, but it didn't matter, because there were enough cannonballs flying that there wouldn't be much left either way.
Eventually, the smoke got too thick, and my eyes watered as I squinted through it, trying to see what was going on. The barrage died down and then stopped, and the thick cloud of gray smog hung about for longer than I would have liked, slowly rising upwards with the hot air left behind by the cannons.
"I — ack!" Rika coughed, covering her mouth with her sleeve. I took her idea and did the same, although it didn't help as much as I would have liked. "I think — urk — think you overdid it, Captain Morgan!"
"Nonsense, my dear!" said Captain Morgan. A crocodile grin threatened to split his face. "No such thing!"
Drake waved a hand in front of her face as though to ward the smoke away. "That's one of those Noble Phantasm things, ain't it? Does it even use gunpowder, Morgan?"
"They're cannons, Captain Drake," Morgan told her like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Of course they do."
"Here they come!" Arash warned, and no sooner had he said so than did something slam into the island below us. It couldn't compare to the shuddering of the cannons firing one after the other, but I still felt the vibrations in the brick beneath my feet like the aftershocks of a distant earthquake.
The smoke had cleared enough at least for me to peer down at the site of the impact and see the vague outline of a hulking figure, hunched over on the promenade. Before my eyes, it twisted and contorted, and what I realized was an arm snapped back into place as the squirming muscles rebuilt themselves in fast forward.
A lead-skinned hand came down and slapped the ground, and with a rumbling, almost leonine growl, the mass of tangled black hair was tossed back as a head rose, half gone but quickly returning. Watching his flesh regrow would have been stomach-churning if I hadn't seen a whole lot worse before in my career, and even then, the only reason my breakfast didn't threaten to make a return was the fact that I hadn't had any.
Herakles.
"You bastard!" a higher pitched voice screamed up at us, coming from that general vicinity. "You blew up my ship!"
"At least you're unhurt, Lord Jason!" Medea the younger said.
"Shut up!" Jason snarled back at her. "You're the one who's so useless you couldn't even block a few cannonballs! Just what kind of expert mage are you, anyway? Gods, it almost would've been worth it to have your older version instead!"
"I-I'm sorry! There wasn't anything I could do!"
"That's exactly the problem! You're so useless that you couldn't even do your job and defend me!"
When the smoke finally cleared, Jason glared up at us, sheltered beneath Herakles' hunched body, with Medea the younger next to him and Hektor landing adroitly in the back. Above him, the last of the damage done by Morgan's bombardment finally filled in, and Herakles slowly climbed to his feet, his lips pulled back away from his teeth in a furious sneer.
"Damn it!" Jason stood, too, faster and more impatiently than Herakles had, and he patted his clothes down to dust the dirt off of himself. "As if these bastards weren't annoying enough, not only did they take one of Herakles' lives, they also destroyed my Argo! Hey, you old hag!"
He jabbed a finger up at us, pointing in Drake's general direction.
"When this is over, I'm taking your ship as compensation!"
"Like hell you are!" Drake hollered back. "The only part of you that's stepping one foot on my Golden Hind is your Grail!"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever." Jason waved her off. "You won't be able to stop me, seeing as you and the whole lot of your pissant crew are gonna be dead!"
"FUCK YOU!"
"Rika," I hissed over at her urgently, "now!"
In my mind's eye, a spider's thread snapped, and magical energy churned through my circuits as I activated Da Vinci's new system. At the same time next to me, as lines of light described themselves up my body and through the predesigned pathways in my mystic code, so too did Rika's. Twin magic circles drew themselves across the brick beneath our feet.
"Siegfried!" I began.
"Aífe!" Rika echoed me.
And then a third voice chimed in, to my surprise, as her brother shouted, "Jeanne Alter!"
"Come forth!"
Three shadows lifted up off of the ground, coalescing into three different figures, two slender and feminine and one broad-shouldered and masculine, and they rapidly filled in, gaining detail and life in less than a second. Barely had we finished calling for them than had Siegfried, Aífe, and even Jeanne Alter formed amongst us.
Atalanta stiffened. "Jeanne Alter?"
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"Hoh?" Jeanne Alter said silkily. "You're actually going to let me stretch my legs, Master?"
"Behave," Aífe told her sternly.
"Your Noble Phantasm is strong enough to kill Herakles, isn't it?" Ritsuka asked.
Jeanne Alter grinned. "It looks like we get to find out!"
"Hey!" Jason squawked indignantly. "Who said you were allowed to call in reinforcements?"
"It's not like we need your permission, Dandyman!" Rika shouted back at him. "Super Action Mom, go!"
"Yes, Master!" Aífe replied, and she kicked off of the ground and threw herself over the crenellations, down into the town below. Jeanne Alter startled.
"Hey, don't start without me, you bitch!"
She scrambled to throw herself after Aífe and dove over the side of the wall.
"Siegfried —"
"I'm aware of our goals, Master," said Siegfried. "Rest assured, I will do my absolute best to fulfill them."
Then there was nothing more for me to tell him other than, "Go."
He took off like a rocket and followed after the other two, and together, the three of them formed a kind of defensive line against Herakles. Jason, seeing them all, sneered, lip curling.
"You bastards actually think you can defeat Herakles?" he shouted up at us. "Tch! You third rate Heroic Spirits really should know when you're outmatched! Herakles is the strongest in the world! He won't lose to backwater hacks like you!"
He smacked his knuckles on Herakles' abs as though to demonstrate exactly how tough Herakles was. I wasn't the only one who didn't find it a particularly convincing argument.
"A lot of talk for someone who's planning on standing behind him," said Aífe. "Stop wasting my time. I finally get to see what all of the fuss is about and you want to stand there and monologue about it."
"Much as I hate to agree with this bitch," Jeanne Alter jabbed her thumb at Aífe, "she's right. Stop pissing around! I don't have all day!"
Jason snarled. "Fine!" And then he stepped aside, pointed at our Servants, and told Herakles, "Herakles! Crush them!"
Herakles tensed, muscles bulging, lips pulling away from his teeth, and then —
"▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅!"
— he disappeared, was suddenly among the three we'd arrayed to fight him, and Aífe let loose a delighted laugh as his fist came down like a hammer upon her crossed arms. The echoing CRACK told me at least one of them had been broken as she was flung backwards, but she stopped only long enough to use a rune to heal the damage.
Jeanne Alter backed away to avoid getting hit herself, but Siegfried leapt into action without hesitation, Balmung glowing a pale blue as he charged up a miniature use of his Noble Phantasm the same way he had against Fafnir. This time, however, it was ineffective, and Balmung skittered off of Herakles' abs without doing anything to him at all.
Herakles' retaliatory punch, on the other hand, smashed into Siegfried like a freight train and sent him flying backwards, although he managed to stay upright enough to land on his feet and skid across the ground instead of tumbling. He felt it — I knew he must have, considering Herakles' prodigious strength — but his own Noble Phantasm had blunted it to almost nothing.
In a war of attrition, Siegfried would lose. It wouldn't be quick and it wouldn't be easy for Herakles, but eventually, the damage Herakles dealt would accumulate, and it would become a matter of whether Siegfried could take all twelve of his lives before taking too much damage to continue.
The world suddenly compressed, condensing down, and a maroon rocket raced towards Herakles as little more than a blur. Herakles turned to face it, snarling, and threw out one of his fists in an attempt to meet it head on, and Aífe mirrored him, throwing out her own fist with a ponderous, inexorable, and very familiar weight.
"Torannchless!"
Herakles exploded. There was no better way to describe it. His hand, his arm, and half of his chest just suddenly burst apart in a shower of viscera that sprayed all over a shrieking Jason, coating him head to toe in red blood. Medea the younger was similarly painted, squeaking as it stained her white dress a ruddy crimson and ran in streaks throughout her hair. Herakles himself collapsed, falling to his knees and slumping over as his jaw fell open and his head lolled, barely attached to a neck that was half obliterated itself.
"I think I'm gonna be sick," Rika mumbled.
"I-I know what you mean," her brother agreed.
"What the hell?" Jason squawked. "How did you do that? Hey! A single punch shouldn't be able to hurt Herakles that badly! Just who the hell are you, you crazy bitch?"
"Smart enough to know that's not the end of things!"
Aífe leapt back and away from the corpse — just in time, because Herakles suddenly surged back to life, his missing flesh filling back in rapidly, and with his remaining hand, tried to snatch Aífe up before she could escape. At the speeds they were moving, I couldn't tell exactly how close he came, but it was almost certainly closer than I would have liked.
A single arrow soared across the gap, whooshing past me with such speed that I hadn't even felt its wake until it had already reached its target, and in a shower of gore and a splash of red blood, one of Herakles' eyes — and half of his head along with it — vanished. Nearby, Atalanta let out a small breath, almost like a sigh.
But Herakles wasn't down for long. He stumbled once, twice, back a meager two steps in all, but before he could tumble backwards and to the ground, he jerked back to life.
"▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅!"
As though he hadn't been interrupted at all, Herakles leapt after Aífe, so fast that he seemed almost to teleport, but before he could reach her, a smaller, black form interposed itself between them, brandishing a sword and a flag as though they were both weapons. Herakles smacked the sword aside like it was a nuisance, and then aimed a punch that would take Jeanne Alter's head off if it connected.
"▅▄▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅!"
Except, somehow, when it landed on the shaft of her flag, it stopped completely. The flagpole didn't crack or break. Jeanne Alter wasn't flung backwards like a ragdoll in a hurricane. Herakles' fist just came to a total halt. Like all of the power behind it had just disappeared the instant it made contact.
"This is the howl of my soul, burnished by hatred!" Jeanne Alter shouted. "La Grondement du Haine!"
Fire exploded from the point where his fist met her flag, and it sent Herakles skidding backwards. Pillars of flame erupted around him, reaching towards the sky and so hot that I could feel them on my face like a bonfire even from as far away as we were, and his head swiveled about like he was searching for a way out.
Suddenly, as though he could sense what was coming, Herakles leapt to the side, and the first stake missed him, and the instant his feet touched the ground again, he dodged again, avoiding the second stake. My eyes narrowed on him again as I reexamined him with my Master's Clairvoyance — Eye of the Mind (False), an instinct for danger, honed through experience. Somehow, it was actually enough to warn him of when he was about to be skewered.
As though Herakles wasn't already an incredibly powerful Heroic Spirit.
"You're not going to escape!" Jeanne Alter crowed.
The pillars of flame twisted and swirled, tightening around him until there was nowhere left for him to go, and they created such a dizzying lightshow that I almost had to look away as they spun. With nowhere left to escape to, the instant Herakles touched the ground again, another stake sprouted from the promenade and stabbed straight through his foot.
"▅▅▄▄▃▃▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅!"
After the first came another, then another, then another, each one bursting out of the ground and tearing through his body like paper. The swirling flames spun faster and faster until they blended together, and the only way I could know that he was still being stabbed was from the roars of furious pain that accompanied each blow.
The flames spun tighter and tighter, compressing down until they had to be burning Herakles as they swirled. They blazed brightly enough to outshine the sun, hot enough to dry out my lips and eyes, forcing me to blink, and then, with a whoosh, they exploded outwards and dissipated into the wind.
Left behind in their wake was Herakles, strung up on the stakes of Jeanne Alter's Noble Phantasm like some grotesque mockery of modern art. Every part of him had been skewered at least once, from his arms to his legs to his chest and even through his throat, and the only reason he was even upright was probably because they were holding him that way. His entire body was charred black, although against his leaden skin, it was harder to see the burns.
"Damn," said Orion. "She's hardcore."
For a long moment, Herakles hung there, suspended, a grotesque sculpture. Longer than I was expecting him to.
"Did…did we get him?" Rika asked uncertainly. "That was only four, right? But he's not…moving."
"He's not disappearing either," Ritsuka pointed out.
"No," Atalanta told them both grimly. "It will take far more than that to defeat Herakles."
As though her words themselves were the signal for him to come back to life, Herakles' head jerked, and a low growl rumbled out of his ruined throat — so low that I couldn't hear it from where I was, but I could feel it vibrating in my bones. With a sudden flex of his muscles, he pulled his arms towards his chest and all of the stakes piercing into him shattered, disappearing into motes of dark light.
"▅▅▄▄▃▃▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅!"
Like a shot from a cannon, he took off, and the ground cracked beneath his feet from the force of his sudden acceleration. Jeanne Alter gasped and scrambled to get out of the way —
"I won't let you!"
— only for Siegfried to put himself between them, sword already swinging as a familiar blue light lit up the blade. Herakles stomped the ground to slow himself, but he was already in range, and Balmung made contact with explosive power, and although he wasn't so much as singed, Herakles was still thrown back.
His feet hadn't even found the ground before a streak of red raced for his chest.
"You're open!"
But Herakles snatched Gáe Bolg out of the air with even less effort than Caligula had, his massive fist wrapping tight around the shaft, and he snarled at it as though he was insulted by the effort. Aífe, racing behind her spear, looked like she was counting on him doing exactly that, because she slammed her own fist against the pommel.
Even as her hand split open and knuckles bled, lines of light — runes — raced up and down Gáe Bolg, and it jerked in Herakles' grip, piercing straight into his chest.
"Gáe Bolg Prototype!"
Herakles roared again as red thorns sprouted from his flesh, one after the other. As though a rosebush was growing rapidly inside of him, they jutted out of his leaden skin, dots of crimson amidst the gray that wept rivers of blood. They spread across his chest, his pectorals, his shoulders, even up his neck, growing out of every vein and artery and ripping their way out of his body violently. Herakles could do nothing but roar and smack futilely at them with his hands, as though pushing them back into himself would stop them from doing any damage, until, quite suddenly, he stopped moving again.
That was number five, and he still hadn't disappeared yet. Without knowing exactly how many of his lives Emiya had managed to shave off before, we were just going to have to keep going until Herakles didn't anymore.
"She just…used her runes to increase the rank of Gáe Bolg?" Ritsuka whispered. "I didn't…know they could do that."
"Primordial Runes are so hax," his sister agreed.
I reached down the line connecting me to our Servants.
Aífe, retreat! I ordered her, and immediately after that, Siegfried, now's your chance! While he's still out, charge up Balmung!
Aífe leapt back, and Gáe Bolg ripped itself free of Herakles in a spurt of blood to zip back into her uninjured hand.
"Yes!" Siegfried acknowledged aloud. He took hold of Balmung with both hands and lifted it high above his head. The jewel in the hilt lit up with blue light, and then the blade did as well, growing larger and larger until a bright pillar jutted up into the sky.
Jason and Medea the younger, perhaps sensing that this wasn't something they wanted to be in the way of, threw themselves to the side and scrambled to get as far from the path of the blast as they possibly could.
"▅▅▄▄▃▃▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅!"
And the instant Herakles regained life, Siegfried brought his sword swinging down like the blade of an executioner.
"Balmung!"
The pillar of light descended. Herakles was swallowed up by it, consumed beneath the searing glare as the air howled and hissed with its passing, and then, with a flash, it detonated, and I had to turn away and shield my eyes with my arm to avoid being blinded. The whole island seemed to shake under my feet, the brick vibrating straight through my shoes and into my toes, and a torrent of sound assaulted my ears as my hair was blown back away from my face, whipped about in the passing wind.
Once the light had died down and it was safe to look again, I turned immediately back towards the fight, bringing the swarm that I had been holding in reserve away from the danger zone closer in. With both Jeanne Alter and Siegfried's Noble Phantasms now used, the amount of sheer destruction any of us could cause in one go was much more limited.
Down below, there was nothing left of Herakles except for a pair of badly charred lower legs that stopped about halfway up the calves, but despite how much of his body was just gone, it was instead Siegfried who was starting to disappear. My lips pursed. A single use of his Noble Phantasm — that, on top of the handful of miniature charges he'd used to enhance his slash, and even just that was enough to burn through his reserves of magical energy.
I'm sorry, Master, he whispered to me across our bond, and then he was gone. At least he'd managed to take a sixth life from Herakles before he ran out of energy.
"Just how many A-Rank attacks are you holding onto, you bastards?" Jason demanded from behind the building he'd retreated to.
"Master!" Medea the younger squeaked. "At this rate, Herakles really will —"
"Shut up!" Jason snarled back at her. "There's no way! There's just no way! Herakles is the strongest in the world! The idea that these pathetic weaklings could actually defeat him is so impossible that there isn't even a word for how impossible it is!"
As though to punctuate his words and give them weight, the ruined legs sprouted bone, then muscle, then skin, and the rest of Herakles began to fill in like an anatomical model adding one layer at a time. In mere seconds, he was back to normal, restored to full health, like he'd never been injured at all, let alone so severely.
"▅▅▄▄▃▃▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅!"
"How many A-Rank attacks do we have?" Rika asked a little hysterically. "How many is it gonna take? That was six!"
And if Emiya had managed just two, then we were only about halfway there, and we were quickly running our options down.
Herakles burst back into motion, except he didn't make for either of the two Servants still down there to fight him, he raced past them like they weren't even there — he was making a beeline directly for us.
Shit!
"Arash!"
"Yes!"
Atalanta startled into action and drew back on her bow, firing shots directly at Herakles, and so did Artemis, but Arash didn't bother to waste time on that and aimed instead for Jason. Almost as though he sensed what was about to happen, Herakles broke off his attack run and spun back around, shattering more of the street as he kicked off the ground and went the complete opposite direction. For an instant, he moved so quickly that I lost sight of him.
And then, like he had teleported, he reappeared in front of Jason, using his body to shield both him and Medea the younger from Arash's volley of arrows. Unlike with Caenis, possessing the Grail did nothing. Arash's arrows still broke uselessly against Herakles' leaden skin, shattering like they were cheap plywood, and then vanishing into particles of light.
A moment later, both Artemis and Atalanta joined in, pinning them down beneath a hail of arrows and giving me some space to think. We'd killed Herakles six times already, but it hadn't been enough. Jeanne Alter could make it an even seven if she could get one good, strong blow in with that sword of hers, but if even that wasn't enough to put him down all the way, then we really would be completely out of options.
The danger of that was that she wasn't that much of a fighter. Not that she couldn't fight at all, but that someone like Herakles was far and away more skilled, even as a Berserker, so if she was going to manage to kill him, he needed to be thoroughly distracted first. Unable to fight back.
I think she would have been rightly angry with me if I suggested she throw herself into that hailstorm of arrows and jump onto his back. Even if this form was only a shadow of her true Servant self, I doubted she would appreciate being turned into a pincushion.
With how much maneuvering it would take to give her that opportunity, it would wind up wasting more time and energy than we could really afford for it to. No, it would be better for us to move onto our backup plan and lure him towards the Ark. Now, while Aífe and Jeanne Alter were still around and in good enough shape to help.
"It wasn't enough," I announced to everyone. "We're going to move on to the next plan —"
"Hey, Artemis!" Orion butted in, sounding annoyed. "Now's the time, don't you think? Are you just gonna sit on that for the rest of the battle? Your Noble Phantasm should be strong enough!"
I wasn't the only one who was surprised, because the twins both said, "What?"
"Oh, but if I'm not careful, Darling, this Spirit Origin might just go pop!" said Artemis.
"This is the final battle, isn't it?" said Orion. "If you're not going to use it now, then when? One way or another, we won't be here much longer anyway!"
"Oh, fine!" Artemis said petulantly. She paused firing only long enough to pull deliberately back on her bow, forming a single arrow along its draw. The tip glowed, and then sprouted protrusions that flickered every color of the rainbow, flowing shafts of light that surged up and down the curve of the bow's arms and formed what looked almost like a pair of ornamental wings.
I wanted to say that thing would never go where she wanted it to. It wasn't shaped right for it. Hell, Emiya fired swords from his bow, and he had to change their shape first to make sure they stayed on course and didn't get slowed down by wind resistance. This thing, with none of that, looked like it would wobble all over the place and flop to the ground.
Of course, this was a Noble Phantasm. Physics could go sit in a corner and cry.
"Watch closely, everyone, okay?" she chirped. "This is my and Darling's love, made manifest! Rampaging, passionate, beautiful — and now, let free to fly! Tri-star Amore Mio!"
Her fingers released the bowstring, and quite suddenly, that mockery of an arrow leapt from her bow at such speed that the air shuddered from its passing. I didn't even see it go — one second, it was there, and the next, light exploded across Herakles' back, and he let out a roar of pain as it pierced straight through his skin and struck his heart.
Again, he fell to his knees, slumping over and trapping Jason and Medea the younger beneath his bulk. Blood splattered over the ground and poured out of the wound, and more flowed freely from it when the arrow itself disappeared, leaving behind a gaping hole half the size of his fist. Arash and Atalanta stopped, waiting to see if that was the last.
For a moment, I dared to hope that would be enough. Seven lives, that was how many we'd taken from him. We'd planned around his Noble Phantasm. We'd gathered an array of different ways to kill him and thrown each one his way, and he'd gotten up to keep going after each one. Seven lives. Had Emiya taken enough for it to matter?
Euryale tentatively approached the crenellations, peering down at Herakles, and she frowned. "Is it over?"
"▃▃▂▂▃▃…"
Herakles suddenly burst to life and spun around, and with a flex of his massive muscles, he slammed his hands into the ground, kicking up a thick cloud of dust and dirt between us and him. Immediately, I sent my bugs in, searching for him, for any sign of him, even if only his passing, and there wasn't even time to feel things out before the earth rumbled again.
"▃▃▄▄▅▅!"
"Shit!"
Aífe appeared abruptly in front of the fort, and she kicked up with thunderous force, obliterating a hunk of rock big enough to have crushed any one of us Masters flat that had come dangerously close to doing just that. I flinched away, shielding my face, and Rika shrieked as tiny pebbles of gray stone pelted us — the parts that hadn't been completely destroyed by Aífe's kick. A line of heat drew itself across one of my cheeks. Several more stung my palms.
Without any warning, he was there, hanging in the air above us, a mass of lead skin and bulging muscle, his untamed hair flapping behind him almost like a cape or a shawl. One enormous hand was balled into a fist and wound back, and it didn't matter who he aimed for, I already knew that anyone he hit was a goner.
He seemed to come down in slow motion, but my own limbs moved as though through molasses. There was nowhere for me to run. Nowhere for us to escape to. Not enough time for me to snap out a command or a spell that would save anyone, let alone myself.
An arm wrapped around my midsection, pulling me back. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the others scrambling, Mash thrusting herself in the front, shield raised to protect the twins, Atalanta pulling back on her bowstring for a point blank attack, Artemis doing the same, Hippolyta kicking off the ground to meet him, Medea shouting something that I couldn't hear over the roaring of my pulse in my ears. Morgan brought up one of his pistols, for all of the use it would be against Herakles. It probably wouldn't even leave a powder burn behind.
"Durindana —"
And then a comet struck him from behind, bursting straight through his skin and out the other side of his chest in a spray of blood and gore. Bright light poured from the golden blade of a lance, surging like a rocket's exhaust and searing the flesh it touched. A trail of glittering energy traced back to its origin and the man in green who had thrown it.
"— Pilum!"