Chapter CXXXVIII: Murderer on the Misty Morn
After lunch, we left the dining room and went about to find ways to occupy the afternoon. Ritsuka decided that he and Mash should go out on patrol with Mordred once his food had time to settle, and Rika — somewhat reluctantly — decided to go with them.
“Who’s gonna look out for you if I’m not there?” was the painfully transparent excuse she used. I guess she was still feeling that helplessness from the Château d’If fiasco, and while he’d proven that he could take care of himself and didn’t need me holding his hand, I could relate to that.
I still hated being stuck in the apartment while the others went out. But I had a ready and convenient method around that limitation, so I told the both of them, “Take Jeanne Alter with you.”
Neither of them had any trouble with that and agreed readily. Jeanne Alter, of course —
“Thank God,” she said with exaggerated relief. “If I had to stick around this fu-fudging place with the twerp while you guys went out and did the fun stuff, I was gonna light something on fire.”
— was only too happy to go with them. Having to censor herself around Nursery Rhyme — who I was becoming more and more certain was playing up the innocent little girl act as a prank on Jeanne Alter for just that reason — was very obviously taxing her nerves, and she wanted to be able to speak however she liked just as much as she wanted to get out and stretch her legs.
Mordred, of course, was just fine with it. She seemed to have found something of a kindred spirit in Jeanne Alter, which made sense, because they were both rowdy, foul-mouthed, and violent. I didn’t want to be anywhere near them if and when they ever got into a serious argument. I wasn’t sure the building they were in would survive the ensuing chaos.
It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to bring Mordred back to Chaldea with us. Not without the simulator up and running for Servants, where they could work out any issues safely and securely without threatening to bring the roof down around us.
While we were on the subject, however, I made sure to bring up the idea of forming a contract with Mordred as I’d promised myself I would once all of the excitement was over from our earlier investigation. I half expected her to balk at the very notion, like her rebellious nature made the thought of ever taking orders from a Master utterly repulsive, but she surprised me.
“Sure.”
“Just like that?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
“Yeah. Why not?” she replied, completely nonchalant. There was no hesitation at all. “Ain’t like I got a reason to say no. You guys are pretty chill, and you know how to handle yourselves in a fight — that shit with that dagger of yours was fucking epic, by the way — so I don’t gotta worry about you getting your asses mowed down because you did something stupid. And having a Master means I don’t gotta worry so much about using too much energy and disappearing. Takes a load off my mind, you know?”
“I think I do, yeah.”
So just like that, we formed a temporary contract with Mordred. I wasn’t sure it would end up becoming permanent, but funnily enough, she’d convinced me that she wouldn’t have any objections to it when the time came for us to head back to Chaldea. Aside from my concerns about her rowdy nature causing problems later on, I found I didn’t have many objections to it either. Not when it gave us yet another strong Servant, one that could give Siegfried a run for his money in a lot of ways.
I was sure Aífe could keep her in line, if it came down to it. She was already mothering Jeanne Alter. What was one more rough, rebellious teenager?
By the tight grimace on Caster’s face, however, he wouldn’t be quite so willing to accept even a temporary contract from us, and I was starting to wonder why it was he trusted us so little. Maybe he just had enough of an independent streak that he didn’t like the idea of taking orders from a Master, especially when I had to assume he had access to as much energy as he needed via the ley line we were sitting on top of in Jekyll’s apartment.
Or maybe it was something more sinister. Paracelsus started with a ‘P,’ after all, and what better way to keep track of your enemy’s movements and plans than to be there as they made them? He’d even given us a false name that had no connection to either his real one or any of the initials in the note Frankenstein had left.
Thinking back to it, he hadn’t done anything overtly suspicious when we found that out. Hadn’t been surprised, hadn’t panicked, hadn’t reacted particularly strongly at all, even to the information that Mephistopheles had been killed. He’d just taken all of the information in stride — and then been helpless in suggesting other identities for P, B, and M.
It was nothing to act on, not yet, but it was plenty of reason to keep a closer eye on him from then on. And make sure, importantly, that I was never alone in the room with him.
Hopefully, I would wind up being wrong and find out I was just being paranoid. Until I found out one way or the other, however, the only thing I could do was be extra cautious around him.
About an hour after we finished lunch, the twins set out with Mordred, Mash, and Jeanne Alter and stepped into the foggy streets. That left me with Arash still on the roof as overwatch, Emiya there with me to act as a relay in case the twins ran into something, Fran just as unable to do anything with the mist still in play as I was, Jekyll, Caster, and Tohsaka and Nursery Rhyme.
I also had a map I could use to follow their course through the city, Jeanne Alter’s senses to borrow, and a Director to inform of the situation and our plans going forward.
Marie wasn’t particularly happy to find out we were going to be exploring the Clock Tower as much as we could for clues, but as much as it bothered her, we didn’t have a plethora of places to look or very many leads to follow.
“The frustrating thing is that I know we don’t have any better options,” she groused.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “P, B, and M haven’t left us much of a trail to follow.”
She chewed on her lip for a moment. At length, she said, “My orders from before still stand. The safety of the team and the success of the mission are far more important than the life of any single individual inside the Singularity, no matter who it might be.”
And we had full permission to do whatever it took to keep everyone on the team safe from anyone in the Association who might take interest. Yeah. The fact we had been given carte blanche to use lethal force if we had to was something that still surprised me. I wasn’t sure it wouldn’t come back to bite us when this was all over and the UN and the Association started pulling up our records of what happened in each Singularity.
But that was a concern for later, the future. We had to get to the point where it was something we actually had to legitimately worry about. After all, if we didn’t fix this and all the other Singularities, there wouldn’t be a UN or Mage’s Association to rake us over the coals for killing a Clock Tower Lord in self-defense, would there?
On the other hand, depending on how thorough P, B, and M had been when they attacked the Clock Tower and how extensive the damage was to the whole place, there might not be anyone else we had to worry about. It wasn’t impossible that more people had escaped the way Tohsaka had, just by being off site when everything went down, but we hadn’t run into anyone like that yet and we might not ever.
I suppose we would find out soon enough, one way or the other.
“Just be careful,” Marie bade me. “Even if there aren’t any magi to get in the way, the attack on the Clock Tower could have let any number of dangerous things loose. There’s no telling what you might encounter when you go to investigate.”
“Of course, Director.”
And then, the connection cut, and the only thing left for me to do was monitor the team’s progress through their patrol. Fortunately, they weren’t going too far afield. It looked like they were making a circuit around the apartment, looking out for anything suspicious and taking out any patrol groups that got closer than we wanted. When I peeked in on them through Jeanne Alter’s eyes, things didn’t look very exciting. It was mostly just fog, fog, and more fog. Again.
That fog was really starting to piss me off. Drake’s ship being what it was and resources being as important as they were at sea, keeping a swarm of any meaningful size had been something I hadn’t dared to risk, but at least then I’d been able to contribute a little bit more in other ways. Being stuck inside the apartment and being unable to see anything outside of it was stifling.
Tohsaka expressed interest in the map, and Caster was only too happy to explain it. The chatter gave me something else to distract myself with while I watched and waited, and while it wasn’t much, it was better than being stuck in the silence, unable to do anything except listen to Mordred and Jeanne Alter swear and Rika crack jokes.
The sooner we took care of whatever was making the fog, the better. A part of me was even hoping that the Singularity would still persist afterward, that it wouldn’t be so easy to fix this whole mess, if only so that I could see some more action before everything was over.
The twins and their group returned late in the afternoon, although the only way to really tell exactly how long they’d been out was the clock on the mantle in the parlor. The report they gave on what had happened while they were out and what they’d seen was essentially as I’d expected it to be, with all the long stretches of aimless walking that entailed, and while they’d come across another patrol group or two, those were easily taken care of.
Also as expected. Jeanne Alter and Mordred were both strong Servants with high stats and good performance. A bunch of puppets, homunculi, and robots weren’t going to be much of a threat.
No sign of Jack the Ripper, though. Maybe he was just being cautious and hadn’t wanted to take his chances on the group as they were. Taking on a single Servant and Master pair was one thing for an Assassin, but taking on three might have been a little too much for him to risk.
Whatever the case, he hadn’t shown up, which meant they hadn’t had a chance to deal with him or try taking him out, so that was a concern we’d have to keep in the back of our minds for later. Of course it couldn’t have been as convenient as getting rid of him so quickly and easily.
For dinner, Emiya — with Caster’s help — convinced Renée to surrender the kitchen again, and he made us a spread of somewhat more Eastern and Mediterranean dishes, as though he was trying to counterbalance her decidedly English fare for breakfast and lunch. We ate well and enjoyed it, as we usually did, and after spending a few hours to refine and rehash our plans for investigating the demolished British Museum in the morning, we arranged ourselves as we had the night before in the apartment above Jekyll’s, only with the added presence of Tohsaka and Nursery Rhyme to make things an even tighter squeeze, and went to sleep so we could get up and beat the mist tomorrow.
Of course, the next morning —
“What the hell?”
— that all ran headlong into a thick fog choking the streets outside our windows. It was just as bad as it had ever been, so thick that I couldn’t even see the front steps from the second floor window, and the sun above was blotted out, leaving behind only the faint suggestion of its presence. My throat burned with remembered pain just looking at it.
“Hey, Senpai,” said Rika a little nervously, “this counts as them changing up their patterns, right?”
It did. And there was nothing for me to do about it. If I walked outside in that, I already knew exactly what would happen to me, and I wasn’t eager to be coughing up my lungs again. The only way I was leaving the apartment today was if I had a death wish or if I was lucky enough that they’d flipped things around and the afternoon would be blessedly clear.
I didn’t think I was going to be lucky.
Tohsaka clicked his tongue. A grimace pulled tight at his lips. “We can’t go and investigate the Clock Tower today.”
No, we couldn’t. Not unless we were willing to split our team in half and let the twins go on their own with the others while he and I stayed here, and while there was merit in the idea, it seemed to me that forcing us to either abandon our plans or modify them like that was the goal of this whole thing in the first place.
P, B, and M wanted us to send the twins out to the Clock Tower without me or Tohsaka there to support them. Whether that was because they wanted to take advantage of the split to attack the twins or to attack us here in the apartment, or even both at the same time, that part we couldn’t know until they acted upon it.
“So it seems.”
Divide and conquer. It was one of the oldest strategies in the book.
On the other hand, uncertainty and indecision were dangerous and deadly tools, too, weren’t they? Sun Tzu said something about that, if I remembered right. About the power of misdirection and misinformation, convincing your enemies to doubt their own decisions so that they made the wrong one.
That one was also a familiar playbook. It had been a while since I was the one on the receiving end. I didn’t like it now any better than I had before.
“Are they trying to stop us from investigating the museum?” Ritsuka wondered aloud.
“But how did they know?” Mash asked him. “Are they watching the apartment after all? Are we being spied on?”
“Fou…” the little gremlin murmured.
How, indeed. There were only so many possibilities. Could they sneak a “bug” around me into the apartment? While we were all out yesterday? Maybe. Probably, even, if they picked the right place to hide it. My bugs could find a lot of things and gave me an incredibly complete picture of the world around me, but they weren’t infallible. Much as I tried to give the impression otherwise, I was perfectly capable of missing things.
But the idea that they could get around both me and Caster was harder to believe. With an Assassin, maybe, but the only one we knew they had was Jack the Ripper, and he was at Alice’s tea party yesterday. There was a window, so it wasn’t impossible…
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Occam’s Razor, however, gave me a different answer.
But then, why heal me, Caster? I asked him silently. The answers I came up with to that one felt flimsy, because he could just as easily have claimed there wasn’t anything he could do to save me. If he really was the “P” in P, B, and M, then he could have been rid of both an enemy Master and an enemy Servant in Arash in one fell swoop, and the twins might not have ever realized it.
I needed to see how he reacted. What he thought we should do about the problem. How strong his opinion on it was. If he suggested that we split the team and send the twins to investigate — if he was insistent upon it, in fact — then that was probably the last thing we should do.
Beep-beep!
When I answered it, Marie’s voice crackled out of my communicator. “We’ve analyzed the fog outside,” she said without preamble. “It sounds ridiculous, but it’s even more toxic than the normal fog you’ve been dealing with so far.”
“Never going to get used to that,” Tohsaka muttered to himself.
“Even more toxic?” asked Ritsuka.
“Yes,” Marie answered, dead serious. “Ritsuka, Rika, Mash, and of course, Servants should still be just fine and experience mild discomfort at the very worst, but, of course, that means —”
“Tohsaka and I absolutely can’t go outside,” I finished for her.
“Right. Even a few minutes of constant exposure will be enough to…”
To kill us, she didn’t say, but I heard her all the same. I’d already suspected that was the case, but the confirmation gave more weight to the idea that this was definitely a strike at us. Either they really did want to separate us, or there really was something at the Clock Tower they didn’t want us to see.
Maybe it was both. The worst kind of trap was the one where you played into the enemy’s hands no matter what you did.
“Damn,” said Emiya, lips pulled tight. “And even if I projected a gas mask…?”
“Unless it was designed specifically to deal with a situation like this, it wouldn’t help,” Marie told him, shooting the idea down instantly. “If it’s a completely ordinary gas mask, it wouldn’t do anything at all.”
Emiya grimaced. “Well, there goes that idea.”
“Da Vinci is working on a solution,” was the ray of hope she offered us. “But she’s not finished with it yet, so it might be another day or more until it’s ready to send to you.”
“I see.” Good news, I wasn’t going to be stuck inside for the rest of the Singularity every time the fog rolled in. Bad news, it was still going to be another day or two before I had a way of safely stepping outside into that fog. “Was there anything else, Director?”
There was a pause. At length, Marie said, “Not at this time. I shouldn’t need to tell you, whatever caused this change in the enemy’s patterns, you need to be extremely careful.”
“We know,” said Ritsuka. “Thank you, Director.”
“Good.” And the connection cut.
“So what now?” Rika asked into the silence that followed. “I mean, this is usually the part where someone says, ‘let’s split up, gang,’ but I’m all out of Scooby Snacks and Fou’s too small to pass for a Great Dane anyway.”
“Fou!” the thing protested. Like she hadn’t made a similar joke just a day ago.
“We should continue this downstairs with Abraham and Doctor Jekyll,” I said instead of addressing any of that. “Maybe Doctor Jekyll’s network has more information for us to work with.”
“A good idea,” said Ritsuka. Someone’s stomach gurgled, and he added, “We should probably eat breakfast while we have the chance, too.”
“We should,” I agreed.
So we climbed down the stairs and to Jekyll’s apartment on the floor below, where Jeanne Alter waited for us, sprawled out on the couch in the parlor. She looked like nothing so much as a particularly lazy housecat.
“‘Sup,” she greeted us. “You guys see that fu-freaky mist, too?”
Nursery Rhyme giggled.
“We did,” I confirmed. “Abraham and Doctor Jekyll?”
I asked more for the benefit of the twins and everyone else.
“In the dining room,” said Jeanne Alter, “waiting for breakfast.”
“You can eat with us, too,” Ritsuka told her. She waved him off.
“Gimme a holler when it’s ready. I’m too cozy to get up right now.”
I wasn’t in the mood to fight with her about it right then, and perhaps sensing that, no one else raised a stink about it either. Let her laze about for now. She’d have plenty of chances to earn her keep in the days ahead.
“At least we weren’t the only ones who noticed,” Tohsaka said as we made our way towards the dining room.
“I’m not sure how you could miss it,” Rika remarked. “It’s gonna hit you in the face the second you open a window.”
The only reason I had missed it before we got up in the morning was because the fog from last night had probably never dispersed. My swarm had never gone out since we came in for lunch yesterday, so there wasn’t anything for me to notice until we got up.
I doubted the enemy knew any of that, because the only people who knew my limits were back at Chaldea, but it was frustrating nonetheless. They’d managed to sneak past me entirely by accident.
“Good morning,” Jekyll and Caster greeted us as we came in. They were already seated around the oblong table in the dining room, sipping cups of tea.
“Uhn,” Fran echoed, hunched over her own teacup.
“Good morning,” I replied, and the others echoed me to varying degrees and in varying ways.
“Renée is in the kitchen cooking as we speak,” said Caster. “Breakfast should be ready shortly, so why don’t you all take a seat?”
I wasn’t much in the mood for breakfast either, but all the same, there still wasn’t anything I could do about it, so there was no reason to go about skipping a meal. If Caster really was a spy, best not to give him any reason to suspect I even suspected him either, so I had to act like nothing was wrong.
I picked the same seat in the middle of the table that I’d been using since we got here and sat down. The twins and Mash took that as their cue and found seats of their own, and Tohsaka was last, picking a seat to my left. On the opposite side of him, Nursery Rhyme hopped up into her own chair and promptly went about swinging her legs about like the child she appeared to be.
Emiya stayed standing, arms folded, behind Rika.
I took the chance to pour a cup of tea for myself. Tohsaka and Nursery Rhyme were the only other ones to follow suit.
“I take it you’re already aware of the fog?” asked Caster, jumping right into things.
“Yes.”
“We saw it when we woke up this morning,” Ritsuka explained.
“Thick enough that Senpai probably can’t cut it even with her super knife,” Rika added.
“An unfortunate development,” said Jekyll. “Shall I assume this will cause an unavoidable delay in your investigation?”
“Yes.” I watched Caster carefully out of the corner of my eye. “One way or another, it seems that P, B, and M don’t want us looking into whatever happened at the Clock Tower.”
Caster stroked his beard thoughtfully, frowning. If he really was a spy, he had one of the best poker faces I’d ever seen, because he gave nothing away. “You think they intended that from the beginning?”
“Do you think they didn’t?”
Caster sighed. “Regretfully, I don’t have any better ideas, and yours has merit. The question of how and when they learned of our intentions to look into their attack on the Clock Tower linger, of course, but…”
Notably, he didn’t suggest there was a spy. I wasn’t sure anyone else was thinking it either, even if it was the most obvious explanation to me.
“Perhaps we are overthinking it,” said Jekyll. “It need not be a direct action intended to stymie our specific efforts today, but instead a general tactic employed by the adversary now that one of their Servants has encountered your presence here directly. You fought with Jack the Ripper himself yesterday, did you not?”
“So Jack told them about us, and they decided they couldn’t afford to let us do whatever we wanted in the mornings,” Ritsuka translated.
That…was actually entirely possible. Ritsuka, Rika, and Mash had already run into and killed one of their Servants, that Caster, Mephistopheles, but Jack the Ripper was the one who fought us and escaped. It may have been that P, B, and M didn’t have any idea we were even here until that moment and had originally assumed Mordred was the one who killed him and wrecked their patrol groups single-handedly.
I wasn’t going to bet on it, though. I couldn’t afford to.
“Holy shit,” Rika said with something like awe. “We really are meddling kids!”
Only if you decided to really stretch the definition of “kids.” Ritsuka, Rika, and Mash might have been underage, but everyone else in the group was legally or physically an adult.
Renée appeared at that moment, announcing that, “Breakfast is ready, Master.”
“Let us table this discussion, for now,” said Caster. “Since it appears no one will be going anywhere this morning, there’s no rush to have everything figured out right this instant. We should enjoy breakfast first.”
No one had any objections to that, and while I still wasn’t really in the mood to eat — and this could very easily be a ploy to buy himself some time — I reluctantly agreed. While Ritsuka went to get Jeanne Alter, Renée went back into the kitchen and returned shortly thereafter with another spread of English breakfast that we all dug into, a little more subdued than the day before.
It was still good, of course, but it seemed mine weren’t the only thoughts that were heavy with the implications of what was going on.
“Another excellent repast, Renée,” Doctor Jekyll said politely when we were finished.
“Uhn,” Fran agreed.
“Thank you, Doctor Jekyll, Miss Fran,” Renée replied in that same monotone. I wasn’t sure whether I imagined the slightest curl at the edges of her lips.
“Onii-chan,” Rika announced, troubled, “I think I’m having an existential crisis.”
Ritsuka sighed. “It’s okay to like people’s food other than Emiya’s, Rika.”
“Blasphemy!” she insisted.
“Against your tastebuds?” I suggested.
Rika’s mouth opened, snapped shut, and then, sulkily, she crossed her arms and told me, “It’s no fun when you ruin the joke like that.”
“Or maybe you just need new material,” Ritsuka said dryly.
She stuck her tongue out at him.
Caster cleared his throat pointedly. “Regarding the issue at hand, namely this fog —”
But Andersen chose that moment to appear in the doorway, solemn-faced and grim. “Jekyll,” he said without preamble, “one of the other collaborators just made contact. They said they needed to speak with you urgently.”
Jekyll stood from the table, folding his napkin more out of ingrained habit than anything else, it seemed, and said, “Please excuse me, my friends, while I see to this matter. I shall return anon.”
“Maybe your collaborator will have some idea about what’s going on,” Tohsaka suggested slyly.
Jekyll offered a smile. “We can only hope.”
He dropped his napkin on the table next to his plate, skirted his way around the table, and left for the office where he kept his radio. I kept tabs on him the entire way with my swarm, positioning enough bugs in the room to listen in on the entire conversation, or at least Jekyll’s half of it.
“Aren’t you all a sorry lot,” said Andersen.
“You didn’t see the fog?” asked Ritsuka.
“What kind of question is that?” Andersen replied. “Of course I did. I would have to be blind to miss it.”
“It means we can’t afford to risk investigating the Clock Tower just yet,” Mash explained. “I’m sorry, Mister Andresen, but that also means we can’t take you with us right now.”
Andersen arched an eyebrow. “And? Are you going to continue stating the exceedingly obvious, or will the merely obvious do?”
“Damn, you’re a mouthy little fu-freak, aren’t you?” Jeanne Alter drawled, stumbling mid-sentence again.
How long was Nursery Rhyme going to keep that going?
“We can take you, Mister Andersen,” the girl in question offered innocently. “I have a lot of friends who can go with us! You’ll be extra safe! Promise!”
“No,” Andersen rejected her immediately. “I prefer books that can be read, not ones that talk back to me. I would stay as far away from you as possible, but unfortunately, here, at least, that’s only as far as the other side of this apartment.”
“Harsh,” Rika remarked.
“There’s no need for that,” Tohsaka agreed, and he actually sounded angry. “Didn’t your parents ever teach you proper manners?”
In his office, Jekyll sat down in his chair and affixed a set of old-fashioned headphones around his ears, then leaned forward and spoke into the just as old-fashioned microphone. The voice coming out the other end was too tinny and muffled to make out the words, but the tone of voice was at least clear enough for me to make out how frantic the guy was.
“You’re getting too attached,” Andersen rebuked him. “You haven’t forgotten that she’s not really your daughter, have you? She’s just a book. There’s such a thing as loving something like her too much.”
“You little…!” Tohsaka snarled.
Mordred chose that moment to materialize in the dining room with us.
“Yo!” she greeted us all. “You guys looked out the window yet? That mist is crazy!”
“Yeah,” Ritsuka answered her. “It looks like we won’t be able to go out today and investigate the Clock Tower.”
Tohsaka, taking advantage of the distraction, forced himself to calm down and ease back into his seat.
“What?” Mordred complained. “Why? It’s just a little fog!”
“Not all of us are so fortunate that we can survive that little fog,” Tohsaka reminded her coolly.
“Tch.” Mordred scoffed. “So? Just stay here then, pansies. The rest of us can handle it just fine without you holding us back!”
“I’m not going without Papa,” Nursery Rhyme said firmly.
Mordred waved it off. “Wasn’t asking you, pipsqueak.”
“Uhn,” Fran grunted. “Uh-uhn.”
“Of course you’re staying here, too,” Mordred replied. “You ain’t got a single lick of magic resistance, and the less people we have to protect down there, the easier it’ll be to get in and find what we need.”
“Sir Mordred might be saying it a little bit…indelicately,” Caster began, trying to cool tempers before they could get too hot, “but it is a viable option, is it not? Four Servants is already quite the intimidating force — sorry, Mister Andersen, I should say five.”
“Leave me out of it,” Andersen said bluntly. “I can’t even throw a proper punch, so don’t even bother accounting for me when you start tallying up your combat strength. I’ll just be staying out of the way while everyone else does all of the fighting.”
“Am I the only one who knows you’re not supposed to split the party?” Rika asked rhetorically.
“Can we afford to miss the chance, though?” Mash wondered. “If P, B, and M really are trying to hide something in the Clock Tower, then the longer we wait, the longer they have to find someplace else to hide it.”
“You might be right,” Ritsuka agreed.
“I’m not sure it’s a risk we want to take,” Emiya said gravely. “Considering some of the things I know for sure are hidden down there, it would be a better idea to go in at full strength.”
“Scared of a few specimens in jars?” Jeanne Alter mocked him.
“I’m more worried about the ones that might have gotten loose,” he shot back.
I jolted up suddenly in my chair, spine snapping straight. Fuck. Of all the ways to get confirmation that this was definitely a trap of some kind.
“Senpai?” asked Ritsuka.
“Is everything all right?” asked Caster.
“Ritsuka, Rika, Mash,” I began. My head turned jerkily, eyes jumping from person to person as I took a mental accounting of everyone in our group. “Take Sir Mordred, Jeanne Alter, and Emiya and get ready to go. The rest of us will be staying here.”
Jekyll was already leaping out of his chair, barely taking the time to rip his headphones off of his head before he rushed out of his office and back this way.
The question was, a trap for who? The people who were going, drawn away by the emergency, or the people who were staying, who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave the apartment while the fog was still choking the streets? If I was the one planning things, it would have been both. Like I said before, divide and conquer. Take out both groups while they were separated and unable to go to each other’s aid.
Whether they had the forces for it was another question, but it was better to assume that they did. At least one more for each of P, B, and M.
“What happened?” Ritsuka asked immediately, all business.
A breathless Jekyll stumbled into the room before I could give him an answer, face ashen and expression grim. His glasses were slightly askew.
“My friends, I bear the most terrible of news,” he announced hurriedly. “One of my collaborators has just informed me — Jack the Ripper has appeared once again, only he is not targeting the poor unfortunate women of the streets, but Scotland Yard itself! He is assaulting it as we speak and sparing no one!”
Eyebrows rose, eyes went wide, and mouths dropped open. Even Caster looked taken aback, like he hadn’t expected this at all. A sign of a change of plans he hadn’t been notified about, or proof that he wasn’t a spy after all? There was no way to be sure just yet.
“Well,” said Emiya, summing up the situation, “shit.”