Chapter V: Beggars and Choosers
Medusa was uninjured. Everything that had been put into getting one good hit on her, and we hadn’t even made it count by dealing a hard blow.
I gritted my teeth, mind racing.
She was right, much as I hated admitting it. I was down to five Gandr shots before I had to rest, Mash was outmatched, and that little distraction trick I’d used probably wouldn’t work twice.
We couldn’t win. Not as we were. We didn’t have a good enough position, we didn’t have enough tactics that would work against someone like her, and we just plain didn’t have the firepower to finish the job.
The only real option was to retreat. But none of us was fast enough to outrun her, and she could just chase us down at her leisure, so the only way for the rest of us to escape was…
“Mash…”
The words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
Was I really going to be that person again? To use and discard her, like she was a tool that could be replaced so easily?
What happened to my decision to focus more on the people than the goals?
“Miss Taylor,” said Mash, voice steady and strong, “please, take Master and the Director and escape. I can’t defeat her, but I’ll buy you as much time as I can.”
“Mash!” Ritsuka shouted, horrified.
“We’re not gonna leave you here!” said Rika.
Mash…
You really were the best person on Team A, weren’t you? Willing and able to stare death in the face in your first real battle for a couple of strangers and two people who might as well have been, all without flinching.
“We’ll hold her off,” my mouth wound up saying. “Director… Take the twins and get going. Find a safe place to hole up until Romani can get you out of here.”
I could feel the Director’s eyes on me, like they were boring a hole in the back of my skull — heh. Wasn’t that an ironic comparison?
“Taylor…”
“Damn it!” Ritsuka said. “Do you think we’re just going to leave the both of you to die?”
“I expect you to remember that this is larger than you or me,” I rebuked him sharply. “The most important thing is getting as many of us back as we can, and the only one of us here who has any combat experience to help out Mash is me.”
I stared down Medusa, trying to project a confidence I didn’t really feel. “I already managed to pull one over on her once. I’m sure I’ll think of something.”
A deep, masculine voice echoed as it broke in, chuckling.
“You have to admit, Lancer, she got you good.”
Mash tensed, and then she rushed over to place herself in front of me. “Miss Taylor!”
Over the spoke of her shield, a man faded into view, hefting a staff and wearing sky blue robes lined with white fur. He was facing towards Medusa and away from us.
“Another Servant?” the Director screeched.
“Even if she only got that glancing blow in,” the newcomer said, “that gumption of hers got me up off my ass.”
Medusa’s eyes narrowed. “You!”
The newcomer pulled back his hood, and long, dark hair fell freely over his neck and shoulders. The glint of something silvery hung from his ears, the one I could see, anyway.
“Whaddya say we finally settle that score of ours?”
“Caster…!” Medusa seethed.
“Caster?” I asked sharply.
If he was here… No, did that mean he wasn’t the one behind the Singularity? Or did he have some kind of other ulterior motive? If he was the one who threw things off track, why would he show himself now, of all times, here, of all places, instead of just letting Medusa finish us all off?
The so-called Caster glanced at me over his shoulder, and eyes the color of freshly spilled blood glinted merrily as his lips stretched into a grin. He lifted one hand in an irreverent wave. “At your service, Princess.”
I looked at him incredulously.
“Princess?”
“I saw your group scoping out the old church a while back,” Caster explained easily, which…I didn’t really know how I was supposed to take, yet. “Wasn’t quite sure what to make of you. Two Masters, a pair of magi, and one, lonely Servant? Curious thing to find, in a city where everyone else is dead, and the little missy there doesn’t match any of the old competitors in this Holy Grail War.”
He gestured at Mash, who blinked at him, nonplussed.
“Because we’re not!” the Director shouted over at him. She stomped her foot. “Geez! Why is that so hard to understand? We’re from Chaldea! Chal! De! A! We’re here to investigate what went wrong with the Holy Grail War, not participate in it!”
Caster hummed thoughtfully.
“Chaldea, eh? Never heard of it,” he said, blasé.
The Director let out an inarticulate scream, like she just couldn’t take any more nonsense.
“Caster,” said Medusa lowly, teeth gritted, “why are you siding with this group of strays?”
“How could I not, after I saw Princess’s clever, little trick? It’s not every day you see a scrawny magus get one over on a Servant, especially one of the Knight classes,” Caster shot back with humor. I hoped he didn’t stick with that nickname, because I really didn’t like how it infantilized me. “And the way these two here were so bravely willing to sacrifice their lives…I’d be ashamed as a heroic spirit, if I just sat back and let that go without lending a hand. Plus…”
The air froze. The presence I’d felt before from Medusa radiated now off of Caster, only his seemed directed at her instead of just spread out like frost across the whole area. The smile had vanished from his face.
“Do I need a reason to help them kill a monster like you, Lancer?”
Medusa snarled and took a step forward, teeth gnashing, and then, as though she’d had an epiphany, she stepped back and her expression fell into one of surprise. It was only a second later that her malicious grin was back and she started chuckling. Her grip on her scythe tightened.
“No, this is fine,” she said, her voice a purr. “Excellent, in fact. It makes no difference if you help them out, Caster, all you’ve done now is save me the trouble of finding you and finishing the job myself.”
“Oh?” Caster asked, something in his tone. “You say that like the outcome has already been decided, Lancer. Are you really that confident you can take on two Servants by yourself, especially if one of them is me?”
Medusa laughed a deep, throaty laugh. “As I recall, Caster, the one who retreated from our last battle was you. If you think a little bit of backup from that baby Servant behind you is enough to make up for your own weakness, then I’ll be happy to break that illusion for you.”
“How kind of you,” Caster drawled.
“Now.” Medusa crouched down, body low to the ground, spiderlike. Her hair fell about her back and over her sides like a cloak, and it almost seemed to have a life of its own. “How should I do this? I think it would be most fitting if I left you alive for the very end, Caster, just so that you could watch me kill these stragglers without being able to stop it.”
Caster grinned, twirling his staff to brandish it out at his opponent. “If you’re going to underestimate me that badly, don’t complain when I beat you, Lancer!”
He glanced back at me. “Hey, Princess. You’re a Master, too, right? There’s no Command Spells on your hands, but I get that sense about you.”
“I was supposed to be, yes,” I said neutrally. “Why? Did you have something in mind?”
My mind raced through the possibilities. Was he about to ask what I thought he was about to ask? True, we’d been trying to summon another Servant to help out earlier, but could we trust this one, when it seemed he was a competitor in this Holy Grail War that had gone sideways? Was this just a matter of him eliminating the competition, or could we trust him to stick with us through to the end?
Maybe the better question was whether or not we had a choice, considering the situation. Beggars and choosers, and all that.
“Let’s form a contract, you and me,” Caster said, his grin taking a sharklike edge. “After all, your group looks like it’s in need of another Servant, and me, well, hey, I’m currently without a Master. Way I see it, we can both help each other out, here.”
Just like I’d thought.
And I wasn’t in a position to refuse him. Not with the situation as dire as it was. I just had to figure out how much that factored into whatever his plans were and whether those plans would be something we needed to worry about later on down the line.
“Miss Taylor,” Mash whispered worriedly.
“I know,” I mumbled back. Louder, I said, “I accept, Caster.”
He thrust his hand out over the spoke of Mash’s shield, and before I could think better of it, I took it with my own.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Then from this moment forth, my sword shall be with you.”
Like the lyrics to an old song, the response rolled off of my lips. “And my fate shall be with you.”
A flash of light, a brief burst of pain that surged up my nerves, and my left hand spasmed as three Command Spells drew themselves in red over the back. I didn’t bother examining the design, beyond confirming that it was there.
At the very least, I should be able to order him to kill himself if he tried to betray us. A cold comfort, but a failsafe like that made me feel better, somehow.
Caster took his hand back as his brow drew down and he tilted his chin towards his chest. “Looks like our contract is set, Master.”
Medusa burst out into laughter, cackling madly.
“You’ve reached a new low, Caster! Are you really so desperate that you’d accept even a scurrying rat as your Master, now?”
“Heh. If you think I’m weaker now that I have a more stable connection to this world, you’ve really got another thing coming, Lancer.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter, either way.” Medusa brandished her scythe. Her eyes seemed to glow from beneath her hood. “I hope you enjoy the brief moment of having a Master again, Caster. It won’t last you very long.”
“Long enough for me to finish you off, first!”
Medusa kicked off the ground, streaking towards Caster like a rocket, but Caster didn’t dodge, like I might have expected, he caught the haft of her scythe with his staff and twisted. His free hand came up and took hold of it just under the mount for the blade, and with expert skill, he maneuvered the thick crook on the end of his staff directly in front of Medusa’s face.
The etchings on it glowed bright orange, and then a ball of fire exploded out of it — and into Medusa’s eyes.
“Agh!”
She stumbled backwards, hand over her eyes, even though the rest of her looked undamaged, and Caster took advantage of the opening to etch a series of runes in the air with such rapid speed that it took even me by surprise. The runes glowed brightly, and then ignited, and an enormous explosion erupted out of them, flinging Medusa backwards.
The entire thing happened so quickly that my hair hadn’t even had time to settle after it had been blown back by the impact of their initial clash.
Medusa landed on her feet like a cat, but she was worse for wear by the explosion. Burns pockmarked her exposed skin, and parts of her bodysuit had been torn away, but for all that she looked injured, it still seemed to be nothing more than superficial damage. At the very least, it hadn’t done much more than make her angry.
“Caster!” she howled.
She kicked off the ground again, throwing up chunks of asphalt into the air, and raced towards Caster again, but Mash took off at the same time, interposing herself between them with her shield up to take the blow. Medusa impacted with a thunderous clang, and Mash grunted as the force of it threatened to buckle her.
“Get out of my way, you brat!” Medusa spat.
Caster thrust his staff out over Mash’s shoulder and past one of the spokes of her shield, but Medusa had learned her lesson and used the circular base as a springboard to leap out of the way of the next fireball and up into the air. She flung out her arms, and her hair took on a life of its own, growing out into lengths of chain that homed in on Mash as though to bind her in place so that she couldn’t interfere.
She didn’t even have the chance to get out of the way before Caster had moved in front of her, and he swept his staff out in an arc, the etchings aglow, and traced a quick circle of runes. Medusa’s chains slammed into it and bounced off like rain, veering into wildly different trajectories that were nowhere near her opponents.
I retreated away from the action as Medusa landed, because any one of the attacks being thrown around by either party would probably kill me if they spilled over enough or Mash or Caster miscalculated. The fight continued on as though nothing had changed, and if I put aside my pride, me disengaging didn’t meaningfully change anything anyway.
“Let me see!” the Director hissed as I rejoined their group.
Dutifully, I held out my left hand for her inspection, and she grabbed at it like a starving beggar, examining the strokes of my Command Spells. I let her at it as I watched Caster and Mash fight Medusa, dancing around the battlefield and throwing up chunks of asphalt as they moved. Mash wasn’t really contributing much — Medusa was far and away more skilled and comfortable with her abilities, compared to Mash, who was very, very new to them. Caster was much the same, though, and although he was mostly playing on the defensive, deflecting attacks and slowly encircling the area so that Medusa’s back was to us, he was just as comfortable as Medusa was and equally as confident.
None of his attacks seemed to be landing, though. Medusa was just too fast and knew them just too well, because what she could avoid, she avoided, and what she could handle without issue, she deflected or just pushed through.
“These aren’t Chaldea’s Command Spells,” the Director announced.
My head whipped around, and the twins, who had been entranced by the fight, turned their attention towards her as well.
“They aren’t?”
“Eh?” Rika said incredulously. “But they look just like ours!”
She thrust her hand out, showing off her own set, and Ritsuka glanced down at his, but while his and his sister’s were similar, even they weren’t quite the same, and they both looked vastly different from mine. Theirs looked kind of like a shield with a stylized face, only the face was different between them, whereas mine… I wasn’t quite sure what mine looked like, exactly, and it didn’t seem important to think about it too strongly, just then.
“W-well,” Rika hedged, “maybe not exactly like ours…”
“What does it mean?” I asked the Director.
She grimaced.
“Well, you did make a contract with a Servant of this sideways Holy Grail War… If I had to guess, I’d say these are Command Spells handed out by the Grail, which means that it’s still around and performing at least some of its functions.”
“Didn’t we already know that?” Ristuka asked. “I mean, the Servants are summoned by the Holy Grail, right? So would they even still be around if it wasn’t here, too?”
“O-of course I considered that angle!” the Director stammered, flustered. “B-but this whole situation is strange, you know, so even that wasn’t a guarantee — n-no, that’s not the important part! Hebert.” She looked me in the eye. “As a Master of this Holy Grail War, you should have something called Master’s Clairvoyance. Chaldea’s in bad shape right now, so our version probably doesn’t work, but you should be able to see the stats and abilities of any of the Servants we run into, here.”
“That’s right,” I mumbled. “You mentioned that back during Team A’s training.”
The ability to see through a Servant’s skills and Noble Phantasms simply by observing them in action… There’d been talk that it might not work on any Servant not contracted to Chaldea’s FATE system, but there was no way to know until we tested it in the field. With all of the damage Chaldea had taken as a result of the attack on the facility, it was likely that it wasn’t even functioning properly now, anyway.
But by contracting with Caster, I’d just given our team an advantage against any of the Servants still around from this Grail War.
I turned back towards the fight in time to see Caster swipe his hand through the air again, sending a stream of fireballs at Medusa. She danced around them with serpentine grace, and what she couldn’t dodge, she deflected into the ground, where they exploded like hand grenades. Mash came up from the side, leaping into the air, and with a shout, she tried to slam the bottom edge of her shield into Medusa.
Medusa didn’t let her and jumped out of the way, then raced back towards Mash and used the shield as a springboard again to fling herself at Caster.
“If you focus, you should be able to see their stats,” the Director said. “In fact, you should be able to contact Caster directly with your mind, as well —”
“Director.”
Her jaw snapped shut with an audible click.
I glanced at Caster and honed my focus, and as I did, his skills and abilities unfolded in my mind’s eye.
Rune Magic — duh, I thought. He’d been using it the whole fight.
Protection from Arrows and Disengage. That explained how he’d been able to come away from, at a guess, multiple fights with Medusa apparently unscathed. Disengage was a useful skill for retreating, but the fact that he had it meant I should be on the lookout for him cutting and running, no matter what he’d said about jumping in because he couldn’t let us die after witnessing our willingness to sacrifice ourselves.
He was a Caster. When half the rest of the classes had some measure of resistance to your attacks, you had to get sneaky and creative about getting around those. If it were me, I’d never engage the enemy outside of my specially prepared territory, where they would run into traps and tricks at every corner.
A quick glance at Mash gave me nothing. That was about what I’d been expecting.
When I looked at Medusa, I could see her Mystic Eyes skill, along with Monstrous Strength and Independent Action, a skill normally reserved for the Archer class. Her Class skill, however, in particular her Magic Resistance…
Convenient. Well, not as convenient as her not having one to begin with, but still good for us, in that it wasn’t as high as it could be. Maybe that low a rank was some kind of side effect of not having a Master, or even whatever had caused the Singularity itself?
Not important, for now.
I focused hard, trying to thrust my mind outwards and towards Caster. I felt a little silly doing it.
Caster?
In the fight, Caster’s step hitched for a bare fraction of a second, so short that I barely caught it, and as he deflected Medusa again, I thought I saw his eyes flicker over in my direction.
Ho? The word came through to me as though across a distance, foreign and intrusive, but not intruding. Looks like I landed a pretty competent Master, indeed. Need something, Master?
He kept fighting, but there was something a little more cautious in his movements, now. I had to be fast — the longer I took, the more I distracted him, and the longer he was distracted, the greater the odds of something going wrong.
Monstrous Strength, Independent Action, and Mystic Eyes, I projected at him. The important part is her Magic Resistance. It’s only rank C. If you’ve got a strong enough spell to throw at her, you should be able to take her out in one hit.
Caster grinned. Good to know. Means this trick should handle her just fine.
Their dance continued. Caster continued to circle, breaking stride only to attack or defend. Medusa ping-ponged between him and Mash, but between Mash’s massive shield and Caster’s surprising skill with his staff, she wasn’t landing a clean hit. Not with the business end of her scythe.
Neither were Mash and Caster, though.
I chewed on my bottom lip, looking for an opening, but I could feel Caster drawing on my magical energy as he fought. Not much, because he obviously had way more than I could ever hope to, but enough that I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to risk using a Gandr to try and distract Medusa again.
If it was truly desperate, I might have. Even with Caster apparently working on his own plan, the itch to get involved was strong. Leaving things to others had never been my strong suit; I preferred being in the thick of things, and maybe that was a leftover from my passenger’s influence and maybe my passenger had chosen me specifically because it was part of who I was, but either way, that was the way it was.
If I passed out, though, what would that mean for Caster? Now that he had a Master, was his performance tied more to me than Medusa’s apparent freedom gave her? It wasn’t worth risking it, not when Caster seemed so confident.
Caster completed his circle. Mash rushed in, trying to bash Medusa with her shield, and when Medusa stepped back to dodge it, she swung that shield almost like it was an ax, swiping at Medusa with the longest spoke at the bottom. Medusa stepped back again to avoid it, then went on the offensive with a flurry of attacks from her scythe. Mash blocked each blow, grunting under the force of them.
“Girlie!” Caster shouted. “Get back!”
Mash braced herself, and in the moment between one swing and the next, she leapt backwards. Medusa made to follow, but she had to dodge out of the way again when Caster flung another huge fireball at her, jumping to clear the distance. She landed in what I realized a moment later was the center of the circle Caster had been walking, or close enough to it.
A rune lit up beneath her foot, and she looked down at it, shock written across her face. “What —”
“See ya later, Lancer.”
— and a circle of glowing runes ignited around her, surging upwards in pillars of flame that twisted and snaked around each other, spinning, swirling, combining into a fiery twister that spat tongues of red and orange. The bulk stayed contained, never leaving the circle of runes from which it had all sprouted, and the air roared as the fire sucked in oxygen to keep going, to keep burning, to get hotter and hotter and hotter.
Even compacted as it was, I could feel the heat from all the way over where I stood.
For an instant, I was back on my first night out, Lung towering over me, the heat of his flaming body piercing the cold, spring night and pressing down on me. My pepper spray had blinded him, but only momentarily, and any single move would give me away. All it would take was one blow, one stream of fire from his fists, and I was dead.
I wished I could believe it was going to be that easy, here. This… This was on a different scale from the fireballs Caster had been flinging willy nilly before. Not a Noble Phantasm, I didn’t think, but still a step above regular attacks. A finishing move, that might be a good way of putting it. An attack designed not to maim, injure, or distract, but to make sure the enemy died.
But if there was one thing I’d learned as a cape, it was that “finishing moves” weren’t necessarily just that. Not if your enemy had a way of surviving it. Not if they were just so tough they could shake it off.
The twister kept burning, and I waited, making sure not to blink, so I could be ready if Medusa came out of that thing alive.
Air alone wasn’t enough to keep it going forever, though, and eventually, the gouts of flame that spawned this hellish tornado ran dry. The twister snuffed itself out with a low whump, and a column of smoke rose up into the sky, mushrooming as the hotter air pushed the cooler air out of the way.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Of Medusa, nothing remained except particles of light that glittered and faded away just as quickly.