Chapter CVIII: Forneus
Herakles landed limply on the fort’s wall — heavy enough that the entire curtain wall seemed to shake beneath his bulk — wedged between the crenellations. His upper body slumped over the spot where we’d just been standing, but his legs dangled towards the ground, and he made for something of a morbid tableau, with his hair splayed about the brickwork and his mouth hanging open as blood slowly pooled beneath him.
Slowly, cautiously, Arash set me back down on my feet and loosened his grip on my midsection. I could already feel the forming bruises along my ribs, distant and dulled by the adrenaline.
“What the hell did you just do?” Jason demanded furiously. “Hektor! How could you? What do you think you’re doing! Traitor!”
“Sorry, Mister Jason,” I heard Hektor say through my bugs. “Master’s orders.”
“Master?” squawked Jason. “What the fuck are you talking about? I’m your Master! I summoned you! I hold the Grail that’s even now keeping you here!”
“Yeah, about that…”
Hektor held out a hand, and with a grotesque squelch and a spray of blood, his spear ripped itself free of Herakles’ body and flew back towards him. He snatched it out of the air with expert grace, then spun it around and pointed the tip threateningly at Jason. Medea the younger squeaked and flinched.
“I’m gonna have to ask you to hand that Grail over. My Master’s allies need it to put this place back in its proper order.”
“Your Master…” It took a second, but Jason eventually figured out exactly what that meant, and his eyes went wide with fury as he snarled. “That bitch! She’s the one behind this, isn’t she? Just like she always is! Just like she always was when we were alive, too! She put you up to this, didn’t she? Stole your contract and swindled you out from under me!”
Hektor smirked.
“Well. Took you long enough to figure it out. Here was me, all worried that you were gonna realize something was off at any moment and turn either of those two pieces of work on this poor, old man. I thought for sure I was going to be a pancake before we ever made it down to this archipelago, let alone Herakles and Caenis being taken out.”
“Bastard!” Jason sneered. “Just who do you think you’re talking about, anyway? Haven’t I told you pathetic losers — YEAH, THAT MEANS YOU, TOO, YOU CONNIVING BITCH — enough times already? Herakles is the strongest in the world! No matter what you throw at him, third rates like you won’t defeat him, no matter what!”
“▃▃▂▂▃▃…”
Herakles fists suddenly clenched.
“He’s still alive?” Rika blurted out incredulously. “How many more lives does he have?”
Hektor looked over towards us, surprise written across his face. “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”
“▅▅▄▄▃▃▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅!”
And Herakles rose up, clawing at the brickwork as one hand scrambled for purchase and the other swiped at Euryale, who avoided his grasp only by the narrowest of margins. The whole fort seemed to shake as his feet scraped against the wall for footholds — or worse, made them in the bricks and stone from the sheer force behind those enormous legs. His eyes glared, one red and one golden yellow, above a snarling maw of shark teeth.
We all threw ourselves back desperately, trying to get out of his reach, and his hand came down, fingers puncturing holes into the battlements, so he could pull himself up to attack us. Arash launched several arrows directly into his face, and so did Atalanta and Artemis, even as both Drake and Morgan fired their pistols, all to no avail. Orion squeaked and hid behind Artemis, and Euryale, perhaps sensing how much danger she was in, turned to run away and into the fort proper, where the Ark was hidden. Hippolyta stepped back and slowly began gathering magical energy, although what for, I could only guess.
“Just stay dead already, you bastard!”
And Jeanne Alter dropped down from the sky like an avenging angel, plunging her sword straight through Herakles’ thick neck. From my angle, I had a front row seat to how it burst out of his throat in another spray of blood.
The growling and roaring suddenly cut out. The great, towering figure of muscle and power froze, one hand outstretched towards Euryale and the other dug into the brickwork, mouth open wide in a rictus of fury, and for a single, heart-pounding moment, hung there, halfway through climbing up the curtain wall.
Nine lives. We’d killed him a total of nine times. Had Emiya really only managed to take two? All of that time he’d bought us, all that he’d sacrificed, had he really taken a meager two lives?
And then, just as suddenly as he’d come back to life, Herakles burst apart into a cloud of glittering dust, and soon enough, even that was gone, too, flickering out of existence like fireflies. Jeanne Alter’s sword scraped against the stone and her boots and armor clinked as she landed, now that there wasn’t anything for her to be kneeling on top of.
For several long seconds, there was only silence as the weight of what had just happened sunk in. Those of us from Chaldea, I think, or at least I did, wondered if that was really, finally it, if Herakles was well and truly beaten or if he was going to suddenly pop up again, fully restored and ready to pound us into paste. I felt around cautiously with my bugs, looking for any place he might have snuck off to for a chance to recover, just on the possibility that he might have, no matter how slim.
But there was nothing. Herakles was gone, and no sign of him, not even the stains of his blood from his many deaths, remained behind.
“I-is he…?” Ritsuka whispered.
“Son of a bitch!” Jeanne Alter sneered as she stood. “That bastard just didn’t know when to die, did he? Ugh! Persistent men like that are such a pain!”
“Y-you…” stammered Jason. “Th-that’s…not possible! Herakles is… Herakles is unbeatable! He’s the strongest in the world! There’s no way a bunch of third rate no-names could ever…!”
“SHUT UP!” Drake hollered at him. “I’m getting sick and tired of hearing those words come outta your mouth like they’re the Gospel truth! Nothing is impossible! No one is unbeatable! And just because that big old bastard had the biggest name ever doesn’t mean that nothing else anyone ever did matters a damn!”
“Goddamn right!” Rika added.
“I almost didn’t believe it was possible,” Atalanta murmured, sounding a little faint. “But we did it. We defeated Herakles.”
“I can scarcely believe it myself,” said Hippolyta.
“We actually did,” Mash agreed breathlessly. “H-Herakles’ Saint Graph confirmed eliminated, Master. We…really did beat him!”
“Thank goodness,” Ritsuka sighed wearily.
“It’s not over yet,” Medea reminded us.
I nodded. “It isn’t. Medea, give the order. It’s time to retrieve the Grail.”
She smiled nastily. “With pleasure.”
Down below, Hektor turned back to Jason and Medea the younger, and he aimed his spear at them threateningly. “Now,” he said, “we were talking about you handing the Grail over, if I remember right.”
Jason flinched and stumbled backwards. “You… You don’t really think I’m just going to hand it over, do you, Hektor, you bastard? I’m going to be a god-king, do you hear? I’m gonna…!” Over his shoulder, he snarled, “Medea, you useless wretch, do something! My wish is about to be taken from me! Everything I’ve worked for this whole time is going up in smoke!”
“But, Lord Jason,” Medea the younger said innocently, “I don’t know any offensive magic. I can’t fight for you at all.”
Hektor sighed. “It’s going to end the same either way, but… Maybe I’m too soft, but I was going to give you the choice about how much it hurt. Mercy, you know? I can see now…”
He pulled his spear back, aiming for a fatal blow. Jason scrambled back, but all he succeeded in doing was pushing himself up against Medea the younger, who squeaked.
“You’re going to chase this silly dream of yours the whole way, aren’t you?”
Blood splattered. The twins gasped, and I threw myself against the crenellations, staring down at the last thing I had been expecting.
Hektor choked, spitting up a mouthful of red blood, and looked down at the spear stabbed into his chest as though he couldn’t believe it either. “Shit.”
“No way!” Mash said. “But I thought…!”
Caenis, absolutely soaked in seawater, still bleeding freely from her wounds, and looking like she had one foot in the grave, panted and gasped as though she had run a marathon. It was her spear that had punched through Hektor’s ribs and deep into his chest, dealing what was no doubt a fatal blow to his spiritual core.
“How is she even still alive?” Rika demanded incredulously, echoing my own thoughts. No one with that many holes in them should still be standing, not even a Servant, unless they had a Battle Continuation skill.
She…did look a little different, though. Less armor, less clothing, and for some reason, a pair of rabbit ears atop her head. Even her spear had changed somewhat, streamlined and become more ornamented.
Had…she modified her Saint Graph somehow? Aside from her appearance, though, I couldn’t find anything different. Her skills and parameters had all stayed the same.
With a savage yank, Caenis ripped her spear out of Hektor’s body, and Hektor staggered, stumbling backwards as he clutched at his wound feebly. His legs fell out from under him, and he collapsed to the ground, blood pouring out of his chest and staining his clothing.
“Well, shit,” I heard him say through my bugs. “I guess that’s it, then. Sorry about this, Master.”
And then, just like Herakles, he vanished into particles of light.
“SHIT!” Caenis screamed, so loud that we could hear her without trouble. “Damn it! You bastards, look what you did to me! Hey, Medea, get off your ass and do some healing! I might not last much longer anyway, but I’m not gonna be able to kill those guys in this shape!”
“R-right!” Medea the younger stuttered, and she leaned to the side of Jason, waving her staff.
There was no way I was going to give her the chance, so I threw every bug I had in range at their whole group and shrouded them in a thick cloud of wings and chitin.
“W-what do we do?” Mash asked. “Master, even in that sort of state, Caenis is still…!”
“We hold out,” I answered before the twins could. “Artemis, Arash, Atalanta, if we can keep them pinned, all we have to do is —”
A wave of water suddenly rose up out of the shallows, tiny compared to the one that had tried to swallow the entire island before, but big enough on its own to reach almost twenty feet up and crash down on Jason, Caenis, and Medea the younger. It washed away all of the bugs I had gathered there, driving them all into the ground and even squashing a large number with the sheer force behind it.
And once they were clear, Caenis slumped over, using her spear to keep herself upright. She looked even worse for wear than she had been when she crawled back up out of the shallows.
If she was that badly hurt, then it really would be that simple.
“Arash.”
Arash nocked a brace of arrows, and then he let them loose at Caenis, aiming to take her out — after all, he’d never handed the Grail back to Drake. Caenis, however, was a bit more slippery than that, because she held up her shield to protect her head and tackled Jason and Medea the younger to the ground. Arash’s volley thudded home in her shield, but went no further.
Arash gave no indication that this was at all a problem, he just readied another barrage and fired them off again. Caenis didn’t dare to move her shield and kept it raised, and once more, it blocked Arash’s arrows and held, but the arrows lodged in its face were being replaced as quickly as they disappeared, and it was beginning to look frankly ridiculous.
“Atalanta,” I said, “if you see the chance, take it.”
“Of course,” she agreed.
Barriers suddenly bloomed into existence in front of Caenis’ shield, large enough to cover all three of them comfortably, and unlike with Morgan’s Noble Phantasm, they didn’t so much as flicker under Arash’s barrage. His arrows instead bounced off of their surface, giving Jason, Caenis, and Medea the younger enough space to climb to their feet.
Medea, our Medea, threw herself against the crenellations and snarled down at them, “What are you doing, protecting him, of all people? Just give it up, you stupid bitch!”
“Never!” Medea the younger shouted back. “Because Lord Jason is —”
“Phoebus Catastrophe!” Atalanta called, and she fired just two arrows not at the barrier, but up into the sky.
Medea the younger screamed, and several more barriers bloomed into being in every direction until she and Jason were ensconced in something that looked more like a dome of interlocking panes of light instead of a wall. And then, the sky opened up, and streaks of light fell like rain from above, leaving trails in their wake like flaming meteors, and while those barriers might have held up against ordinary arrows, these were not.
Atalanta’s Noble Phantasm did not quite rip through the shell of barriers, but it didn’t take long for it to start breaking them, shredding the panes of light one after the other. By the look of what I could see through the bright flashes down below, Medea the younger was trying her damnedest to replace every barrier as it broke, and to her credit — even with her Saint Graph ripped in half — she wasn’t failing completely.
But she wasn’t succeeding either. The arrows from Atalanta’s Noble Phantasm were coming down just too quickly and in too high a number, and it was only a matter of time before the sheer volume and speed with which they dropped upon her outpaced her ability to shore up her defenses. Her barriers shattered and tore, and slowly, that dome shrank and holes opened up in its surface.
The only thing she and Jason could do was cower and press themselves as close as they could against Caenis, who lifted her shield upwards and held it over their heads like an umbrella in a desperate attempt to protect them all. Somehow, by some miracle, it worked, and by the time the rain of light came to an end, they all managed to come out of it unscathed.
Caenis’ shield, however, had been reduced down to a pitted, jagged piece of scrap that remained only barely attached to her arm. There wasn’t enough left of it to even properly call it a shield anymore, that was how utterly it had been destroyed.
“Atalanta, again,” I told her quietly.
A single arrow leapt across the distance in the space between breaths, just after Atalanta’s Noble Phantasm ended, and Caenis reflexively batted it aside with what remained of her shield. In the shadow of that arrow, however, another flew — this one from Arash, who had come to know my tactics so well that he could predict what I was going to order — and once more, it sank into Caenis’ flesh effortlessly.
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Caenis staggered, stumbling, and nearly tripped over Jason and Medea the younger as she struggled to stay on her feet. More blood poured down her chest from the wound.
“DAMN IT!” Caenis ripped the arrow free from her body and crushed it, roaring. Even as her edges started to flicker and fade, her whole body began to glow with golden light. “I WON’T…BE TAKEN OUT BY YOU FUCKS THAT EASILY! LAPITHAE —”
Red blood flew. Medea the younger squeaked and Jason let out a startled yelp, and they both scrambled away as quickly as they could. Caenis, wide-eyed, stared down at the rusted, ruined sword that jutted out of her chest as though it was some kind of monster she’d never seen before.
Standing behind her and holding that sword —
“Who the hell is that?” Orion asked hysterically.
Rika gasped. “Davy Jones!”
“W-when did he get here?” Mash wondered.
— was a familiar gaunt, tattered figure, his seaweed-like hair and beard dripping with water.
“What the hell?” said Drake. “So he was on our side the whole time?”
So it seemed. I wasn’t entirely convinced, but it was certainly looking like he just might be.
“Caenis of the Argonauts,” he said in a warbling voice, “your time has come. The sea welcomes you. It is time for you to return home.”
“You…bastard!” Caenis choked out. “You’ve got…some of him in you, don’t you? That son of a bitch god…Poseidon!”
“I am no god,” said the stranger, “merely a custodian, here to prevent further deviance. All those willing to further that deviance in the name of selfish gains…”
He twisted his sword, and Caenis gasped as more blood flowed from her wound and soaked her front. Her outline became even fuzzier, even less distinct, but somehow, she held on. It was frankly astounding that she was still managing to stay alive just through sheer bullheaded determination.
“…must be eliminated.”
“Fuck…you,” Caenis rasped.
The pitted sword was ripped free of her body, and as she stumbled — as though that sword in her chest had been propping her up — the so-called Davy Jones wound back his arm, took aim, and —
Rika gasped again and turned her head away, just in time to avoid having to watch Caenis’ head go flying as her body collapsed limply to her knees. Neither remained long enough to hit the ground, instead bursting apart into particles of light that flickered and vanished moments later. This time, there could be no doubt that she had been killed for sure.
“Oh dear,” Artemis murmured, “what an unpleasant way to go, the poor girl.”
“Save your pity,” Atalanta said bluntly. “Whatever we were in life, whatever we might be in some future summoning, here and now, we’re enemies. She made her choices to follow Jason — they all did.”
“Tch.” Jeanne Alter sneered. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bitch.”
“E-enemy Servant response dissipating,” Mash reported, looking even paler than usual. “C-Caenis is…confirmed defeated, Master.”
“I…can see that, yeah,” Ritsuka said faintly.
With his grisly task done, the stranger turned now to Jason and Medea with all the slow, ponderous weight of an executioner.
“Jason of the Argonauts,” he said in that gurgling voice of his, “you covet the Holy Grail. You must die.”
Jason flinched. “N-no! No! It’s not over yet! I refuse to die here, after I came so close! I refuse — Medea!” He spat at her again. “Medea, get off of your worthless ass and protect me! Do your duty as my wife!”
“Protect you?” Medea the younger asked, confused. “Lord Jason, I already told you, I don’t know any offensive magic. I can’t fight for you. And my defensive spells are weaker than they should be, so I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time until the enemy breaks through them.”
“Then what good are you?” he howled at her. “Pathetic! Worthless! You good-for-nothing, backwater priestess!”
“This is kinda sick,” Rika muttered. “These two…weren’t they supposed to be madly in love? This just sounds like spousal abuse.”
It really did — but then, I wasn’t surprised. If Jason and Medea had ever actually been in love, then the later events of their lives would have soured it. The only question was whether this vitriol was new or a common part of their relationship.
“The only one Jason has ever truly loved is himself,” our Medea said scornfully. “That’s why…the only thing he really cares about is his own wealth and power.”
Medea the younger sighed. “Well, I suppose it can’t be helped, at this point. If things go on as they are, then this whole thing is finished for sure. It seems it’s time for the contingency plan.”
Contingency plan? There was a contingency plan? To…what? Summon more Servants to fight for them? Was there another way for them to trigger the collapse of the Singularity using just the Grail they already had in their possession?
Or was there something else I wasn’t seeing?
Jason took a step back from her fearfully. “C-contingency plan? What are you talking about?”
“Come now, Lord Jason, you’re not truly that foolish, are you?” Medea the younger said. “Did you really expect that you could become a god-king by sacrificing a god to the Ark? The only thing that would result from a scheme like that is the destruction of this space-time. Shouldn’t it have been obvious?”
Jason’s eyes went wide with terror. “Y-you lied to me?” he squeaked.
“If you sacrifice a Divine Spirit to the Ark, then all of your enemies would be destroyed, and even the world itself would be torn asunder,” she told him matter-of-factly. “That would be a form of ultimate power, wouldn’t it? There was no lie in that.”
She waved her staff, and a pane of light appeared to block the stranger’s sword. His strike bounced off of it with the tinkle of cracking glass.
“Rude!” she said petulantly. “Can’t you wait for a moment?”
“W-wait,” said Mash, “does this mean…Jason didn’t know what was going to happen this entire time?”
“It’s looking that way,” I said.
Although that was its own kind of pathetic.
Surreptitiously, I began spreading out my bugs, looking for signs of anything happening. Flauros had shown up right at the end of Septem, after we’d defeated Romulus, and according to our Medea, another Demon God, Forneus, was supposedly involved in this one. Now would be right about the time it was mostly likely to show its face, or whatever it might have had that passed for one.
“I’m gonna need you guys to give me the play-by-play later,” said Rika, “because I can’t hear a word they’re saying, now that they’ve stopped shouting.”
“Yeah,” her brother agreed. “Later.”
“The younger Medea is revealing the truth of their plan to Jason,” Atalanta summarized, “and it seems that Jason truly was uninformed about what would actually happen if it succeeded.”
“Of course he was,” our Medea sneered.
“Y-you…” Jason stepped backwards, and then he seemed to regain some confidence, because he snarled, “What would be the point in that? You bitch! I can’t be a god-king of a pile of ash! That’s not what I wanted at all!”
“Oh well.” Medea the younger shrugged. “The contingency plan doesn’t actually need you to be willing anyway. All it really needs is the Holy Grail in your possession.”
“M-my Grail?” Jason flinched again. “No…!”
He turned around as though to run away, but he couldn’t even make it a single step before the bottom of Medea the younger’s staff found his back and pierced straight into it.
“Did she just literally stab him in the back?” Rika demanded. “God… I’m going to need to keep a scorecard at this rate! It’s like they’re actively trying to tick off every box on the Evil Villain’s Bingo List!”
“Arash!” I said aloud, and he drew back on his bow to fire off another volley of arrows — to no effect, because they bounced off of Medea’s barrier spell just the same as the stranger’s sword had.
Aífe! I ordered her urgently. Whatever she’s doing, stop her now!
Aífe kicked off of the ground and took off like a rocket, racing towards Jason and Medea with all due speed —
But Jason’s wound had already begun to glow, and a miasma of raw power oozed out of him like a physical force. He flesh bubbled and bulged, inflating, growing larger and thicker in a way that we had only seen one time before, when Lev turned into Flauros.
“Holy Grail,” Medea the younger said, and it sounded like an incantation or a prayer, “vessel of desires, granter of wishes, manifest before me and grant my wish.”
“Graaaaaaah…!”
Jason’s groan tore out of his throat with a tortured rumble, and his body had already expanded to twice its natural size. When Aífe smashed into him fist-first, his skin ruptured like an overfilled water balloon, spilling a brackish ichor that I could smell even from so far away — and as though that was what allowed it to break free, his flesh started to tear, revealing —
“Oh god,” Rika whispered. “No. It’s another one of those things!”
— leathery black skin, writhing and growing and merging together. Aífe leapt back and away from it as it got larger, returning back to our group, and the thing got ever bigger, expanding outwards and upwards, growing large, ruby-like orbs — eyes — that spiraled up along its length. Soon enough, the leathery black skin grew too tight, and around the eyes, rifts split open, revealing raw, red flesh beneath the surface.
“M-magical energy reaction!” Mash shouted. “Senpai… That thing, it’s just like the one back in Septem!”
“By the gods,” Atalanta muttered, “what is that thing?”
“There’s no question about it now,” said King David, who had returned from watching the Ark almost without me noticing. Bradamante, who had gone with him, did a double take and gaped up at the monstrous form of Forneus. “What Medea told us earlier, it’s the truth. That thing… Without a doubt, it can only be one of Solomon’s seventy-two demons.”
Bigger, and bigger, and bigger, it grew, until it had consumed the whole town and towered over us, reaching up towards the sky. Twisting, turning, it was so big that it should have collapsed under its own weight, but it gave no indication at all that such a puny consideration as physics meant anything to it — and, of course, that should have been expected. This was no less deviant than Flauros. It had nonstandard biology, did not have to care about what we thought it should or shouldn’t be able to do.
“It’s even bigger than Flauros,” Ritsuka breathed.
“Master,” Bradamante began, “you fought something like this before? Th-this was the enemy at the end of the last Singularity?”
“The fuck?” Jeanne Alter shouted. “What the fuck is that thing? It’s fucking huge! And gross!”
“Oh dear,” said Artemis. “Do you see, Darling? This is why I had to, um, replace you when you were summoned! I can’t even bear the thought of you facing something like this on your own!”
“H-hey!” squawked Orion. “You know, you realize, if you’d just come here as yourself, you could flatten this thing in no time! W-wouldn’t that have been a better idea?”
“But then I wouldn’t have been able to stay with you!”
“I think there are more important things to think about here!”
“Just like before,” Aífe said solemnly, “the Grail’s inside that thing, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
And just like last time, the only way to retrieve it would be —
“So we’re going to have to cut it down to size, just like Flauros,” Arash said.
“Fuck!” said Drake. “You lot have seen something like that before? Fuck me!”
“Only once,” I answered.
“Wait!” She threw herself against the crenellations, looking down at the town below that was no longer there, consumed by Forneus’ bulk. “Shit! Bombe! Are you scumbags still down there? FUCK! My crew, my ship!”
“Oh, crap!” said Rika, panicking. “I-I forgot they were still down there!”
“You don’t need to worry,” I told them both. “The crew boarded the Hind and set sail towards one of the other islands the instant they saw what was happening.”
Smart of them, considering. I would’ve thought they might try something ridiculously brave, like sailing out to fight Forneus with nothing but ordinary cannons. It seemed they had more sense than I gave them credit for.
“They did?” Drake looked ready to collapse, such was the intensity of her relief. She sagged away from the battlements. “Damn. Bombe, you sly old bastard! I’m gonna kiss you next time I see you!”
“So how do we deal with this thing?” asked Atalanta, staring up at the grotesque tower of flesh that had finally stopped growing. “Since you seem to know what it is and how it works.”
“Destroy it faster than it regenerates.”
She glanced at me askance. “That simple, is it?”
Aífe huffed a chuckle. “Simple, she calls it. The previous one of these was a monster that took a hit from Caladbolg and still came back nearly instantly. This one is even larger and more monstrous. It may not go down quite so easily.” Her grin fell away. “Master. If I’m going to try what worked last time, I’ll only have enough for one attempt.”
“Do it,” Ritsuka ordered before I could. “If we can end this with a single attack —”
“GRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH.”
The entire island shook and rumbled as thunder rolled, drowning out whatever it was Ritsuka had been about to say, and it vibrated down to my bones so intensely that I was nearly thrown off my feet. The others gave shouts and yelps of surprise, but I couldn’t hear any of them, only see their mouths open, because the echoing boom bored into my eardrums just too loudly. The brickwork beneath us quivered and threatened to break apart, and out in the shallows, waves rose and rippled out to sea.
And then it ended, and silence filled the space it had left with a ringing weight. It took me an extra second — more than it should have — to realize it was the sound of the Demon God’s groan.
That was all it had done. Groan. And just that much had nearly been enough to blow out my eardrums and shake the whole fort apart under us.
“Holy shit,” Rika breathed, “that felt like a solid six-point-five!”
“M-Magical energy reaction,” Mash stammered disbelievingly. “Master, there was enough magical energy just in its voice to match an A-Rank Noble Phantasm!”
The Demon God’s eyes suddenly flashed, one after the other, and fire exploded up in the air above us like fireworks. Flash — boom — flash — boom — flash — boom, in rapid succession, in all of the most random of places.
“The hell is it doing?” Drake demanded, squinting against the light.
“More magical energy reactions,” Mash said, something like horror in her voice. “Senpai… I think… Each one of its eyes is a Mystic Eye!”
Ritsuka sucked in a breath. “Oh.”
“Oh,” indeed. That wasn’t good.
“For the rest of us!” Drake hollered.
“It means that it just has to look at us to cast a spell,” Atalanta answered for me. “The instant it turns its eyes on you, it can set you on fire.” She smiled grimly. “And it has a lot of eyes, doesn’t it?”
“That’s cheating!” Rika whined.
“Fuck yeah, it is!” Jeanne Alter agreed. Complained, more like. “Why don’t I have a set of super special eyes like that? That would be fucking —”
“UNFORGIVABLE,” Forneus rumbled, cutting her off. I had to slap my hands over my ears just to keep from being deafened. “UNFORGIVABLE. YOU PESTS AND YOUR INSOLENCE…ARE TRULY UNFORGIVABLE!”
Every single one of its eyes that could turned towards us, and the instant I realized its intent, I pulled up every bug I could and threw it between us and Forneus.
“Mash!” I shouted, feeling like I was screaming into a hurricane.
Mash was a step ahead of me, having no doubt realized the same thing I did, and she planted her shield in between the ‘teeth’ of the crenellations, facing outwards. Bracing herself against the fort beneath her feet, she summoned what sounded like every ounce of breath in her body and shouted, “LORD —”
“PERISH.”
“— CHALDEAS!”
The Demon God’s eyes flashed, all of them at once. The bright blue rampart of Mash’s Noble Phantasm built itself into existence rapidly, forming a protective barrier between us and Forneus. A black cloud, a swarm of flying insects as large as I could make it in the time I had, rose up in front of Lord Chaldeas, like a layer of ablative armor.
In an instant, it was seared away, and they all disappeared from my grasp. A flash of light and heat erupted against the surface of Lord Chaldeas, sending a shockwave through the entire fort that threatened to throw us all to the ground and a blast of hot air that whipped my hair about my face, and Mash let out a cry of alarm as her one foot slid backwards, forcing her to bend over to keep from slipping.
But when it was over a moment later, we were all still standing, and Lord Chaldeas was undamaged. We’d made it through unharmed.
Enormous cannons suddenly began to form in the air behind Forneus, ghastly and ghostly, dripping seaweed from their barrels, and a rickety, half-decayed wreck of a ship pulled itself up from the water in a spray of mist. As one, they belched smoke and fire, and their cannonballs smashed against Forneus with echoing booms and wet squelches — to almost no effect. They didn’t even manage to break the leathery skin.
“PATHETIC NUISANCE,” Forneus rumbled. “BEGONE. TAKE THY PALTRY AUTHORITY BACK TO THE GRAVE.”
Its eyes turned away from us long enough to swivel towards the ghost ship — towards the so-called Davy Jones, who must’ve been the one commanding it — and one after another, they flashed again. The staccato of rippling explosions tore through the air, and we couldn’t do anything but watch as they blasted the ship to pieces, one chunk after another, until the charred, flaming remains collapsed into the sea. In the air, the phantom cannons flickered, and then vanished.
It wasn’t much of one, but it was an opening. The least we could do to repay him was take advantage of it.
“Aífe!”
Her name hadn’t even finished leaving my mouth before she was taking off, flying up over Mash as she cocked her fist back. That familiar feeling of being dragged into a point held in her hand overtook me again, growing and growing until it reached the level it had when she struck down Flauros. The ponderous, inexorable gravity of it seemed to pull the fabric of reality along with it.
And then she swung her fist forward, and the entire world shook.
“TORANNCHLESS!”
BOOM
The eponymous Thunder Feat was let loose. The air cracked and howled. In an instant, an enormous chunk the size of a whole house disappeared from the Demon God’s tentacle body, taking one or two of his eyes with it, and the water in the shallows erupted into a geyser as the leftover force smashed into the sea. Brackish black ichor fountained out of the hole and showered the entire island — us included.
“Oh, this is so gross!” Rika shrieked.
Forneus shuddered and shook. A high-pitched, keening wail echoed out across the entire archipelago, drilling into my ears, and I had to slap my hands over them again just to keep from being deafened again. An icepick pounded into my head on either side, the beginnings of a migraine that I could feel coming on, and I squeezed my eyes shut as though that could stop it before it started.
Eventually, the shrieking faded, although I couldn’t have said why or how, since it didn’t have lungs to run out of air. My ears rang in the aftermath, to the point I felt more than heard Aífe land back amongst us heavily. A glance showed her fuzzy around the edges, barely holding onto her form. That Thunder Feat had drained her almost dry.
And Forneus himself…was already filling in the hole she’d left behind. At first, slowly, much more slowly than Flauros had, and I thought for a second that maybe all of that extra bulk made it harder for him to heal his wounds when he only had access to the same amount of power Flauros had, and then, without warning, it accelerated and the damage disappeared like evaporating steam.
Damn it.
“WRETCHED FILTH! VILE VERMIN! HOW DARE YOU!”
Master, Arash said urgently, just now, Medea, the younger version, she cast a spell. The reason Forneus recovered so quickly, it’s because she’s healing him!
My heart skipped a beat. That meant I was right, didn’t it?
Take her out! I ordered against the pounding in my skull.
As swiftly as I gave the order, Arash nocked an arrow, took quick aim at something I couldn’t see, and let it fly. Forneus’ gaze was suddenly on him, watching the path the arrow took —
“NO!”
— and a burst of fire ignited midair, trying to stop it, but it was too late and too slow. The arrow flew true, too fast to be knocked off course that easily, curving around Forneus’ bulk, and I watched through my remaining bugs’ eyes as Medea the younger turned at the last possible second — and the arrow punched straight into her chest. She collapsed to the ground, bleeding profusely. She didn’t stand back up again.
“UNFORGIVABLE!” Forneus thundered. “UNFORGIVABLE! I SHALL NEVER FORGIVE THIS TRESPASS, YOU SCUM!”
All of its eyes turned towards us again, and anticipating what was coming, Mash braced herself and her shield, and she cried out a second time, “LORD CHALDEAS!”
Once more, a blast of light and heat detonated against the glowing blue rampart of her Noble Phantasm, and a wash of hot air whipped across the curtain wall where we stood, but nothing else. The island shuddered beneath us, and I felt it vibrating through my body — a second later, I realized what it was: a growl so low that it was actually inaudible to the human ear.
Every single one of Forneus’ eyes began to glow, and the gathering magical energy was so enormous that I could feel it condensing in front of us completely unaided, like a thick tar that was oozing into the air.
“HARKEN —”
BOOM
The air shuddered again, and Forneus jerked as something smashed into it from behind. Concentration broken, its eyes turned around, looking for what had dared to interrupt it.
“WHAT?”
“Is that…?” asked Ritsuka.
Behind Forneus, the Whydah Gally sailed into the archipelago, cannons smoking and ready to fight.