Chapter CXLVIII: Steampunk Fantasy

There was no time to reprimand Rika for her mistake — and in truth, her outburst might not even have made much of a difference anyway — because the giant Helter Skelter lurched into motion with surprising speed. Steam gushed out of ports along its body, and impossibly, its feet left the ground. Not much, not by far, but enough that another burst of steam from the jets in its back pushed it forward far, far faster than something that size had any right to be.

"Senpai!" Mash shouted. She leapt forward ahead of the group, flinging her shield in front of herself protectively to deflect the enormous cleaver.

Despite the sheer difference in their sizes, she succeeded. The cleaver bounced off of her shield like a bullet ricocheting, but Mash was flung backwards with equal force and slammed into the ground so hard that her knees buckled. She had to cling to her shield just to keep herself from collapsing.

"Mash!" Ritsuka cried.

"Go!" I shouted.

Arash, Mordred, and Jeanne Alter leapt into action, two of them going towards the Helter Skelter and the other retreating back to get a better angle.

The ringing metallic screech as their swords and arrows failed to do more than leave a few faint scratches behind was enough to put my teeth on edge. Even the Servants winced, and the twins both slapped their hands over their ears.

"I'm sorry!" Rika managed to squeal.

"Master!" Emiya barked.

Rika startled. "R-right! Go, Emiya! Turn that scrap into a heap!"

I was already slipping back to a safe distance as Emiya leapt into the fray, mind awhirl with different tactics to attempt against the enormous Helter Skelter. Several of them, I had to discard out of hand, especially when Emiya utterly failed to leave more than a scratch as well.

Brute strength looked like it was out. Despite their best efforts, no one was leaving behind much more than scratches, and those were being casually ignored by the thing. Even Mordred's prodigious strength, nearly a match for Herakles himself, couldn't carve deep enough to make it all the way through the armor and into the delicate mechanisms beneath.

A flashbang? I hadn't had much use for those in this Singularity, for a multitude of reasons, and I thought it was probably too risky to try it against this Helter Skelter, too. No one had told me that whatever sort of camera or whatever it was using for vision would be vulnerable to sudden and intense light, and it might not even be using the normal human analogue. It could be using sonar of some kind — although I doubted someone in our group wouldn't have picked it up in that particular case — or infrared to see through the mist, or maybe it went a little sideways of that and detected concentrations of magical energy, designed to filter out the mist as background.

It was a robot that seemed to run on some kind of steam engine. I wasn't ruling anything out that wasn't immediately obvious.

Gandr was out, as were my ravens, for mostly the same reason as each other. Ignoring the damage Huginn and Muninn would suffer in the meantime, the Helter Skelter I'd tried to use them on before had proven that the plating on the smaller versions was already too thick to be appreciably damaged by their mana cannons or my dinky Gandr.

Master's Clairvoyance on this thing failed, which only proved that it wasn't a Servant, just another of the robots scaled up to massive proportions. I didn't think it had Magic Resistance, but for all practical purposes, no spell I or the twins could throw at it would do anything useful.

"Spirit and technique, flawless and firm."

Emiya backed away before I could come up with a plan of action, but only long enough to throw his pair of swords like boomerangs at the Helter Skelter. They bounced off of its armor ineffectually, but he already had another pair in hand.

"Our strength rips the mountains. Our swords split the water."

He threw this pair, too, to similar effect. The enormous Helter Skelter didn't even seem to notice them, for what little that was worth when the thing had no face and no expression and no body language to speak of.

"Our names reach the imperial villa."

As the first two pairs rebounded and swerved back around, he made a third pair and rushed in. Between his first step and the last, they grew twice their size, and the familiar feathery spikes jutted out of the spines.

"We cannot hold the heavens together!"

With all of his strength, he brought them down upon the Helter Skelter's armor, right on either side of the neck. The same technique we'd seen him use against Caligula, cutting through his impressive armor, bit into the Helter Skelter's thick plate the way nothing else had so far — and still, it didn't go all the way through.

Emiya grimaced. "Shit."

The Helter Skelter's jets spewed more steam, and it spun with speed, using that spin to give weight to its cleaver in a sideways swipe instead of going through the whole motion of lifting and swinging its arm. Emiya threw himself backwards, but Mash threw herself in the path of the cleaver in the same moment, and once more, while she was tossed back by the force behind the blow, her defense was enough to push the Helter Skelter back, too.

What a ridiculous thing it was. But I guess, if the gray Helter Skelter were the elite versions, strong enough that they might even be able to give a Servant pause in great enough numbers, then this thing must have had even more time and effort poured into its creation. A day? Two? Whatever the case, that time and effort had obviously been well-spent, because it was shrugging off everything we'd thrown at it so far.

Silk lines were also out. I didn't have any fliers to carry it, nor spiders to attach it, and with how much weight that thing had to throw around, I would have needed to weave a whole web around it to manage anything of worth.

Another volley of Arash's arrows bounced off of the chestplate.

My knife? Maybe. But even if it could slowly chew through that armor, I had a feeling it would be a slow, painful process. An option, but it was the long game, and there were a number of things that could go wrong.

"Shit!" said Mordred, echoing Emiya. "Good job, Shieldy! Hey, Emiya, whatever that was, it didn't work!"

"I can see that!" he retorted.

"Not like you have much room to talk!" Jeanne Alter said. She rushed in, taking aim for one of the jets in the lower legs, but her sword simply scraped against the armor and skidded off, leaving behind another scratch. "Damn it!"

"What was that about having room to talk?" Mordred mocked.

"Shut up!"

I could try and bring in Aífe. Her Thunder Feat might manage to do something against that thick armor plating, although whether it would be enough to deal significant damage without needing every ounce of energy she had was another question entirely. Having her tear a hole in the plate would at least give us an in to the internals, something to target more effectively, and we could take it down that way.

But I didn't want to use the limited number of charges for summoning Shadow Servants that we had unless we really had to. If we burned one now, then with the amount of time it took to recharge, I might regret using it now when I had need of it later.

It was an option on the table, but we had another one that didn't spend a finite resource.

"Everyone, back up!" I shouted.

Jeanne Alter, I projected in the same moment, I need you to use your Noble Phantasm on that thing.

She grinned. "Alright! Let's heat things up a little, then!"

She swung her sword up, pointing it towards the sky, and a flame burst into life in front of her. The others, either sensing what was about to happen or understanding the gist enough to know they needed to get out of the way, did exactly that and broke off. The Helter Skelter spun in place, like it didn't know who it should chase after first.

"This is the howl of a soul filled with hatred!" Jeanne Alter crowed with malicious glee.

Her sword came down.

"La Grondement du Haine!"

The flame erupted, and a line of fire leapt across the ground between her and the Helter Skelter, blazing over the distance with a heat so intense that I could feel it even from where I was, safely out of the danger zone. The Helter Skelter tried to dodge, using its steam jets like thrusters to push to the side, but the line of fire curved to follow, and even if it was far too fast for something its size, it wasn't nimble enough to keep dodging the way Herakles had.

The instant it reached the Helter Skelter, the fire split and circled around it, growing into pillars of flame that dwarfed the thing three or four times over, a great gout of heat and light that I was sure the entire city must have been able to see. Beneath my mask, beads of sweat formed and were absorbed into the fabric, joining the spots where the mist had condensed against my skin.

The mist's friction against my magic circuits had nothing on the intensity of Jeanne Alter's Noble Phantasm.

The pillars of flame spun and swirled, and although we couldn't see them through the haze and the blinding display, the sound of the characteristic stakes erupting out of the ground and the screech as they punched into — and hopefully through — the Helter Skelter were far too loud to be drowned out.

Jeanne Alter looked delighted.

"Fuck," said Mordred. "A little more warning would've been nice, ya know."

Get ready to use yours next, I told her, and she grimaced.

"You really think this thing's that sturdy?" she asked aloud.

I wanted to be wrong, but —

"Yes."

The maelstrom of fire died down a few seconds later, and as I'd been afraid, it revealed the Helter Skelter intact. Not undamaged, because those stakes had done their job, punching holes throughout the Helter Skelter's legs, but still in good enough shape that it was moving. Haltingly, jerking around as the damage done to its body and its mechanisms turned the stilted, robotic motions of its limbs erratic, but still moving.

The real point, however, was that its armor was a bright, cherry red. I wasn't sure how much I could trust regular physics to apply to something a Servant had made, product of a Noble Phantasm or not, but if it did, then the heat would have warped a good deal of its structure. It would be at its weakest right now, and that meant that it would be easier to punch through than before.

I took a scant second to look through Jackie's eyes and make sure she was out of the line of fire, and that confirmation was all I needed to know that it was safe to do the next part.

"Mordred, go!"

"Heh!" She grinned. "So you're letting me off the chain…huh!"

She took hold of her sword with both hands, squeezing the hilt. What I'd originally thought of as ornamentation along the bottom of the blade sprang out as though attached to a hinge, and sparks of electricity leapt up and down the whole thing as red light flowed out and upwards. I was reminded, for an instant, the way King Arthur had used Excalibur back in Fuyuki, but this was an order of magnitude less intense than that.

"I'm the only one…who gets to fuck up this country!" Mordred shouted. "So take your knuts and your bolts, and go back to wherever you fucking came from!"

The red light surged.

"Clarent —"

She swung.

"— Blood Arthur!"

A beam of red light leapt from the path of her sword. The wind howled, the ground shook, and the Helter Skelter was consumed, but the beam continued on, and it struck the House of Parliament behind the Helter Skelter. If the Helter Skelter couldn't stop the beam, then a building of mere stone and glass couldn't have hoped to, and so the beam kept going, rising up and into the sky. It punched a hole into the oppressive cloud cover, allowing a brief glimpse of the afternoon sun that had been choked by the fog for the better part of the last week.

And then it was over, and there was no more giant Helter Skelter. A massive divot, exactly the size of the beam, had been gouged out of the pavement, leaving behind a blackened scorch mark, and an even larger section of the House of Parliament was simply missing, as though it had been erased.

Rapidly, that was disappearing. The tunnel of clear air that had been seared through the fog was filling back in the same pace as before.

"I-I think it's dead," Rika said.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"I'm…not detecting any trace of the Helter Skelter anymore, Senpai," Mash reported.

Fran agreed with her customary, "Uhn."

"What the fuck?" Jeanne Alter demanded. "The fuck was that? You trying to show me up, you bumpkin?"

"Not my fault you weren't able to follow through," Mordred said smugly.

"But you did destroy our current best lead," Emiya said. He glanced over her direction. "Right?"

Mordred's smirk fled her face instantly. She jerked a thumb at me. "Only because she told me to."

Emiya turned to me, arching an eyebrow.

"It wasn't giving us much choice."

Although there wasn't any guarantee we would've been able to do anything with it even if we had managed to disable it without destroying it. All of Fran's earlier looks into the smaller versions had only led us here.

He acknowledged that point with nothing more than a short nod. "That still leaves us back at square one, though."

"Maybe not," said Arash, and without explaining any more than that, he picked his way over and across the divot, towards where the giant Helter Skelter had been. Eventually, he wound up far enough that I lost him in the fog.

For what felt like several long minutes, we waited. What he might have seen or what he thought he might find, I had no idea. The remains of that giant Helter Skelter? Even if it hadn't been completely destroyed, it wasn't like the guy who made it had conveniently left his name under the hood somewhere.

Despite that, however, I trusted Arash's instincts enough to know that there had to be something. Whether it was usable or not was a different question.

"Arash?" I asked.

"Found something!" his voice called.

The twins shared a look, and then looked at me, and all I could offer them was a small shake of my head before I went over in the direction Arash had gone. It didn't turn out too hard to find him, however, even in the fog, because all I had to do was follow that scorched divot. The twins and the others followed me in turn.

Arash was picking through a pile of scrap when I reached him, crouched down to the ground. Bits and pieces of metal had been flung about by the blast of Mordred's Noble Phantasm, small chunks and hunks barely big enough to fit in my palm, and they formed a scattered trail towards the House of Parliament. At a guess, they were the parts that were in places protected by its armor plating well enough not to get instantly destroyed.

That any of it managed to survive not one, but two Noble Phantasms was already remarkable.

"Goddamn," said Mordred, looking down at the bits of metal strewn about. "That fucker really built his shit to last, didn't he?"

"What was that about following through?" Jeanne Alter jeered.

Mordred grunted. "Fuck off with that," she grumbled.

"It might be better that you didn't manage to destroy it completely," Arash said. He dropped the shard he'd been examining and moved on, bending back down when he found another piece big enough to be worth something.

I joined him, walking over to another chunk of plating that was big enough to have something etched into it, and squatted down to pick it up. Carefully, of course, because it was a shard of jagged metal, and while we had our First Aid spells, there was no need to spend energy on them as long as I took care not to get myself cut.

As though seeing me had been a cue of some kind, Ritsuka jolted and came over, too. "Let's go," he said to the others. "More people looking will make it go faster, right?"

"Uhn!" Fran grunted.

Mash nodded. "Right!"

Jeanne Alter rolled her eyes. "Fine," she said with the air of someone about to do something she hated.

"Afraid you'll cut yourself?" Mordred teased her.

Jeanne Alter flipped her the bird.

"It's all fun and games until someone chips a nail," said Rika, but she came over, too, and we all picked our way across the trail.

It was slow going. A lot of the pieces left behind were just tiny fragments, no bigger than my thumbnail, and hard to distinguish from a pebble in the mist. Occasionally, however, there was a piece of piping, a thick shard of the armor plating, or some fragment of the internal mechanisms that was too damaged and too small to figure out what it had been used for.

For a Noble Phantasm — and the product of one — the Helter Skelter were remarkably complete. Every part seemed functional instead of decorative, and frankly, without being a mechanic or an engineer myself, I couldn't have said what any of those parts was for. At the very least, however, the evidence I had so far suggested they ran on some kind of steam power, and I wished Da Vinci was there to explain whether that was in addition to or as a replacement for whatever magical energy had been used to form and animate them to begin with.

"Hey!" Rika exclaimed suddenly. "I-I think I found something!"

When I looked over, she was brandishing something, a hunk of material about the size of an old satellite phone from the 90s and nearly as thick. Rika, crouched near the arched doorway that would lead into the building, had found it after it must have bounced off of the doors or something.

The rest of us abandoned whatever paltry scraps we'd been sifting through and went over to her, and she held it out for us all to examine. "See?" she said. She ran her fingertip across it, pointing to something that had been etched into the metal. "It's hard to make out, but it's there!"

I squinted down at it, but the writing was faint and the fog and the scorch marks made it hard to find the individual letters. The engraving was far too shallow, and between being hit by two Noble Phantasms, it may have been warped.

Ironically enough, if it had been in braille, I probably would have been able to read it just fine.

"Definitely something there," said Arash. "Let me get a closer look?"

Rika nearly shoved it into his hands. Arash took it, faintly amused, and bent his neck down to get a better look.

"A, r, l, e, s," he said slowly, "and then I think there's a space between them. The second word is B, a, b, b, but the rest is cut off. Beneath that is a date, AD 1888."

"Arles babb?" Mordred asked, confused. "The hell is that? You sure you're reading that right?"

"Maybe not."

He handed it over to her, and she took it, squinting down at the lettering with a look of concentration. "A, r, l, e… Fucking… Damn. That really is what it says."

She gave it back to him, frustrated.

"It's missing at least a few letters," said Arash, "from both the first and second names. The date, on the other hand, that's all there is to it. No day or month, just the year."

"A date of manufacture," Emiya murmured thoughtfully.

"Looks that way."

And, presumably, the name of the man who made it. I couldn't say I recognized it, however, and I couldn't fit the name of anyone I did know about from this era with the steam-powered robots clunking about the city. On the other hand, I couldn't think of anyone who fit the mold when I looked at it from the lens of who could have made those robots, so maybe that wasn't the best metric to be using to fill in the blanks.

"Arles Babb," I echoed, but saying it didn't magically conjure up the missing letters that would make it make sense. "A Caster with a Noble Phantasm that makes robots. We don't think he's a mage, so he must have been some other kind of…intellectual to make it to the Throne —"

Mash gasped. "Charles Babbage!"

Who? From the looks on everyone else's faces, no one else had any idea who that was either.

Except for Fran, who had gone ramrod straight, eyes wide and mouth dropped open. "Uhn?"

Mash nodded. "That's who it must be!" she said. "Charles Babbage! He was a famous scientist and mathematician of this era, a-although he died almost twenty years ago from the current date, so he must be a Servant!" She looked down and then across to the divot, where the Helter Skelter had been destroyed. "I-it even makes sense that he made the Helter Skelter. Steam-powered machines were his specialty! He even made a rudimentary computer using one!"

This guy made a steam-powered computer in the mid-1800s?

"Definitely a Heroic Spirit," Emiya agreed, sounding impressed.

"Is that really that big a deal?" Mordred asked.

"It'll be another hundred years before computers start to become commonplace in family homes," I said. "Another twenty from there before they get small enough and powerful enough to carry around in your pocket."

Although that was massively simplifying things and I simply didn't know enough about the history of computing to give more detail than that. A sudden pang stabbed me in the gut — Defiant and Dragon could probably have explained all of those things, down to the date and functionality of each advancement.

"Alright," said Mordred, grudgingly impressed, "maybe this guy's a big deal, then. Doesn't explain what he's doing here and now."

A good point. If we assumed that Babbage was the B in P, B, and M, then it wasn't a stretch at all to assume that this fog, it wasn't a fog at all, it was steam, cooled by the air as it spread through the city. The question we had to ask from there was why he was making it in the first place. What did he hope to accomplish?

An equally pertinent question, was it even his idea at all, or had the mysterious third player, M, who Paracelsus had warned us was the most dangerous, put it in Babbage's head? Maybe the only thing he'd actually done to Babbage was convince him to bring his fantasy world to life, a world populated by steam-powered mechanical monstrosities, where all of his greatest creations flourished.

"Let's take a break," I said, and the suddenness of my suggestion had everyone looking at me askance. "We'll go inside and talk about this there. Away from prying eyes."

Understanding flitted across their faces.

"Yeah," said Ritsuka, "we've been doing a lot of walking. Let's get off our feet for a few minutes."

"Oh!" said Mash. "And I have Miss Renée's snacks here, too! We can eat those!"

Emiya's brow twitched, but if anyone else noticed, no one commented on it, and he said nothing himself.

Jackie? I projected down along our bond. Come on back.

Okay, she replied simply.

So we left that particular section behind and made our way a little further on, entering the Palace through a set of wooden double doors that wasn't directly beneath a section that had been destroyed by Mordred's Noble Phantasm. We stepped first into an entrance room, and then beyond that into a hall with high, vaulted ceilings. Statues of famous Englishmen, none of whom I recognized on sight, lined either side, and reliefs were carved into almost every wall, broken up only by paintings of what I assumed were yet more famous scenes out of British history.

Some depicted men in coats of chainmail, shields hung across their back and banners flying, with what I assumed was probably Richard the Lionheart standing triumphantly in the middle of it all. Some depicted coronations or knightings or some other sort of diplomatic function, with men in tights and women in medieval gowns. The others, I couldn't even guess at, so I didn't even try.

Jackie reappeared amongst our group then, startling several of the others. Mordred swore up a storm, and spent several minutes afterwards grumbling about how much she hated surprises.

It felt a little silly, but I didn't protest when Jackie slipped her hand into mine, like we were a pair of tourists there to see where the metaphorical magic happened.

I led the others through the halls and the corridors, deliberately avoiding the rooms where all the bugs had died from contact with the fog, and eventually, we wound up in a dining hall, a narrow room with a long table at its center. If I thought Jekyll's apartment had the most stereotypical Victorian wallpaper, then this room had gone out of its way to prove me wrong, because the red, gold, and green paisley pattern looked like it had sprung directly out of a regency romance, and the paintings hanging on the walls and the golden wood paneling only made it even worse.

Mom would have loved every second of it.

"Damn," said Rika. "If this is the kinda place you eat when you're in government, I gotta become a senator or something."

As if it was that simple.

"Here is fine," I said. I pulled my mask off, ran a hand through my hair, and slipped my glasses back on. "Mash?"

"Yes!"

We all took a seat around the table, and from inside the compartment in her shield, Mash produced the wrapped bundle Renée had given her before we left the apartment. When she untied the knot and unfolded the fabric, it was to reveal more of those jam sandwiches, sprinkled with powdered sugar.

"Oh!" said Rika, grinning. "Those were really good!"

"They really were," Ritsuka agreed with her.

Emiya's brow twitched again. "I-is that so… Maybe…I'll have to ask her for the recipe."

And it sounded like the very idea caused him physical pain.

Mash started to pass them around. Even though the Servants didn't need to eat, Renée had packed enough for all of us to have one, with a few leftovers for anyone who wanted seconds. One of them wound up in front of me, but I passed it over to Jackie first, who smiled at me and said, "Thanks, Mommy!"

The smile and the pat on the head were becoming almost routine. I wondered which of us was really teaching the other how this parenting thing worked properly.

"So," I said as I accepted my own little sandwich. Conveniently, the plates and utensils had been left out when this place was abandoned. "Charles Babbage. What do you know about him, Fran?"

Fran, halfway to biting into her own sandwich, froze for several long seconds.

The twins and Mash, all three noticing the lack of a response, turned to her. "Fran?" asked Ritsuka.

Slowly, miserably, Fran set her sandwich back onto her plate, uneaten. "Uhn," she said at length, staring down at the tablecloth. "Uh, uh, uh-uhn. Uhn."

Modred grunted and leaned back in her chair, taking a huge bite of her sandwich. "So that's how it is, huh? Figures. Ain't nothing in this fucking place is simple or easy."

Rika's hand rose.

"She knew Babbage," I answered before she could say anything. "Back before her creator locked her up. She even met him in person."

"Uhn," Fran confirmed. "Uhn, uh, uh, uh-uhn. Ah…uhn…"

"It's how she's been able to use the Helter Skelter to find the central control node we just destroyed," Mash translated. "She's not following the magical energy so much as she is the traces of Babbage's presence they contain."

Fran's mouth drew into a miserable line. "Uh, uh, ah, uh, uhn."

"That doesn't matter," I told her. "Paracelsus already explained it. Whoever he is, M has been twisting the minds of all the Servants he recruits. Whether Babbage would do something like this doesn't change the fact that M could make him."

And if M could make an esteemed, learned mage like Paracelsus, a genius in his own right, submit and dance to his tune, then someone like Babbage, a man who — presumably — had no actual talent for magecraft and no magic resistance to fall back on, wouldn't be able to even resist. As callous as it might be to say so, he simply didn't have the right skills to try.

Maybe we shouldn't be splitting up so much anymore. M's hypnosis may not be subtle in anyone we had yet seen suffer under it, but that didn't mean he wouldn't be able to subvert one of us if he got us alone.

Fran didn't try to deny what I'd said, but it didn't make her any happier either.

"Besides, this guy's a Servant, ain't he?" said Mordred. "You should know what that means by now. He's not the man you knew. He's just a restless ghost who's been twisted up by some fucker who thought it would be a fun way of screwing with history." She took another bite of her sandwich, then brandished the remainder at Fran, and with a full mouth, continued, "If anything, yer doing him a favor, yeah? The real Babbage, I bet he'd be pretty disgusted with what this version of him is getting up to! He'd wantcha to fix it up and set the record straight!"

Despite how she said it, this was what got through to Fran, and she firmed up, mouth thinning into a determined line.

"Uhn!"

I turned to Arash, and like I didn't already know the answer, I asked, "Do you still have that hunk of the control unit we destroyed?"

"Sure."

He produced it from one of the pouches hanging from his hips and set it down on the table, well away from any food.

"Do you think you could use that to track Babbage?" I asked Fran.

She hesitated. "Uh-uhn. Uhn…"

My lips thinned. Only a "maybe," huh? I wasn't inclined to think she was deliberately holding back, if only because she had to have had at least some idea of who we were tracking down when she pointed us this way in the first place and had still done it. The fact that they had led us here instead of to Babbage himself, however, gave me a pretty good idea why she was so uncertain.

Ritsuka sighed. "It can't ever be that easy, can it?"

Almost of its own accord, my mouth quirked up on the one side. Was that pattern recognition after four Singularities and all of the associated bullshit, or was I really rubbing off on him that much?

"Hey, now," said Arash. "We still have a lead, don't we? Why don't we give it a shot before we start talking about how bad things are?"

"Even if it doesn't pan out, it is still a lead," I agreed.

"Yay for optimism?" Rika offered half-heartedly. Jeanne Alter snorted.

"Well, I guess we don't have anything to lose by trying," Ritsuka hedged.

"Even if we don't find Babbage himself, we still managed to find one of his high spec models and took it out," said Emiya. "Well, it's not what we might have wanted, but it's still an accomplishment."

"Come on," Mordred complained, "what the hell is with all of that? Where's the support? Fran'll totally make it work, I know it!"

Ironic that someone like Mordred was the one being most supportive.

"Yes!" said Mash. She turned to Fran. "Don't worry, Fran! It might be hard, but I know you can do it! You'll find Professor Babbage for us, I just know it!"

Fran nodded. "U-uhn! Uh-uhn!"

"The power of positive thinking!" Rika cheered, throwing up her arms.

"Finish your sandwich first, or else it'll go to waste," I told her.

"Ah!" She scooped up the last remaining bit of sandwich on her plate and shoveled it into her mouth. A pleased whine vibrated out of her throat. "So good! Emiya, you really gotta get the recipe from Renée!"

The smile he gave her was painfully fake. "I'll…see what I can do."

"So what happens when we do find this guy?" Jeanne Alter asked around a mouthful of her own sandwich.

"Ain't it obvious?" Mordred said. "We kick his tin can ass!"

"I know what you want to do to him," Jeanne Alter drawled. "I was asking the people with more than one brain cell."

Mordred grunted. "Fuck you."

"Told you, you're not my type, British."

"If the spell he's under is anything like the one that was used on Paracelsus, he might be able to slip us bits of information around the margins," Arash suggested.

They might not be that coherent, though. Too, it bore repeating that Paracelsus was an accomplished genius mage, and while Babbage was no less intelligent, unless there was something in his past that never got recorded in history, he didn't have the magical know-how to fight a Master effect as strong as M's.

"I don't think that's something we should rely upon," Emiya hedged.

"It's worth a shot, though, isn't it?" said Ritsuka. "If it doesn't happen, then it doesn't happen, but if Fran can find him, then trying to break through M's spell might work, too."

It was a lot of ifs to stake the investigation on, and while I didn't have a precog to tell me the odds on each one, I had a feeling they weren't particularly high. That was familiar in its own right, the sort of thing I'd been dealing with my entire career, and my time at Chaldea hadn't done much to prove it wrong.

But I'd also spent my career beating those odds. I'd threaded that needle more than once, and more than once in these last few months, the world had conveniently dropped just what I needed in my lap. Maybe Fran would find Babbage, and maybe Babbage would be strong enough to resist just long enough to tell us what we needed to know to find and defeat M, whoever he was.

"It is," I agreed.

And if it didn't work, we still had other avenues of investigation to pursue. The trackers on the Helter Skelter patrols, the ley lines. We weren't pinning our hopes entirely on one thing succeeding.

I finished the last of my own sandwich and swallowed before saying, "We'll take a few minutes to let our food settle before —"

Something dropped suddenly from thin air down the hall from us, a massive form whose landing made the floor beneath our feet tremble, and everyone felt it.

"What the heck was that?" Rika squeaked. "Who let the T-Rex out of her pen?"

My bugs surged into the hallway, abandoning subtlety to get as good a look at whatever it was as I could. Another Helter Skelter, steel gray, with golden accents. The lenses of its cameras were red, and unlike all of the others before, it wielded some kind of enormous mace that was almost as big as Helter Skelter itself. It lifted the mace as though it weighed nothing at all and pointed the end of the head — straight in our direction.

If it was far enough away to avoid having its presence detected immediately, then it wasn't far enough that any of our Servants could miss the magical energy it was gathering.

Silverware clattered. Plates fell to the floor and smashed. Mash leapt out of her seat.

"Master!"

"Get down!" I shouted as I seized Jackie and pulled her into my arms, then threw myself to the floor.

A bare second of stillness, a heartbeat —

And then a hurricane smashed through the doors like a cannonball.