Chapter XIV: Sinner and Saint
The dragon’s roar seemed to shake the world, and answering screams came from the fort in the distance as it descended like the wrath of some terrible, pitiless god.
I broke into a run. I didn’t even think about whether it was a good idea or not. All I saw was an enemy — a familiar one, one I knew how to fight and beat, one I now had the tools to beat, again.
“Senpai!”
“Miss Taylor! Wait!”
My swarm rose up, from the grass, from the trees, from every nook and cranny where they’d been hiding, waiting, living, and they took to the air ahead of me, around me, and the buzz of their wings was like a heavy drone that I felt within me as much as I heard, vibrating through my whole body and soul. Neither the dragon nor the soldiers racing back towards safety could miss them, and as the soldiers broke whatever ranks they had managed to muster to defend against the beast, the beast itself turned away from them and towards me.
I didn’t waste any time. The instant it was in range, I set my swarm to harrying it. My harmless fliers, the ones that didn’t have any hard offense, they honed in on its maw of sharp teeth and its nostrils. The sole nest of wasps I’d managed to collect, they focused on its eyes and swooped down, stingers ready, venom set to deploy.
My plan fell apart almost immediately.
I’d known, intellectually, that actual dragons were much different from Lung. They were existences of fantasy rather than passengers meddling, creatures that man didn’t understand and so had gained a degree of power that modern weapons couldn’t touch. Lung’s scales, I could have cut through. Punched through with a knife or a bullet, or failing that, one of Bitch’s dogs could have torn him up with their teeth. His mouth was armored, but although his biology was strange and inhuman, he himself was still just as human as any other cape. I could have drowned him in bugs, the same way I had Alexandria, if I wasn’t afraid to lose twice the number to his flames.
A real dragon, it turned out, wasn’t that easy to put down.
My harmless fliers came within reach of the dragon’s mouth and nostrils, and the sheer power, the dense magical energy in its breath killed them immediately, overloaded their bodies until they burst, raining their guts down to the ground in a disgusting shower of yellowish viscera. The beast swung its long neck to and fro, and with every pass, anything that came within three feet of its fangs simply exploded.
The wasps didn’t fare much better. They flew towards the beast’s eyes, stingers out, and thrust them with all their meager strength towards the vulnerable tissue, but when the narrow points came into contact with the dragon’s eyes, they skidded off, like there was some membrane as strong as iron that they just couldn’t penetrate.
A dragon’s entire body was Mystery. I hadn’t thought much of that lesson, at the time, beyond filing away the important bit for later: Mystery could only be beaten by a stronger Mystery. It had sounded like sophistry, like some zen koan that was supposed to be incredibly insightful or a recursive argument that wound back on itself.
I was beginning to see what it meant, now. A dragon was a creature of mystery that existed in the realm of fantasy, and that meant that the only way to kill it was to have enough magical power to hurt it. My bugs, meagre existences that had so little strength on their own, either in the physical sense or the magical sense, couldn’t even pierce its flesh, let alone the scales that covered it like armor. Even my wasps couldn’t hope to hurt it at all.
The only thing they were good for was a distraction.
It meant I had to reorient my plan, because there was no way for me to bring this thing down by myself, not the way I had those skeletons in Fuyuki. No, of course not, what had I been thinking? Cúchulainn had said it himself — skeletons, reanimated corpses, were the lowest of the low in terms of magical beasts and familiars. Any mage worth her salt could pick them apart, as long as their numbers weren’t overwhelming.
My bugs were the same way. They had always been the same way. It was just that humans could be brought down by stings and bites in ways something like this couldn’t.
My thoughts raced, and as my bugs adjusted their courses to focus on its eyes — to block the dragon’s vision, even if only with the sheer volume of bodies that buzzed around its head — a new plan started to form.
I wouldn’t be able to do it by myself, though. I’d need some help from someone with the raw strength to hurt it. Fortunately, there was just such a person running behind me.
“Mash!” I shouted. “Bring it down!”
“W-what?” she called back.
“To the ground, Mash!”
Through my swarm, the small number of bugs I’d stuck to the rest of the team more via old habit than conscious consideration, I felt her shift as she turned to the twins.
“Master —”
“Do it, Mash!” Ritsuka ordered.
“Y-yes!”
And then, she leapt into the air, far, far too high for a human to manage, still carrying that massive shield around like it weighed nothing at all, and my bugs parted in front of her to give her a clear path to her target.
“Hiyaaah!”
The thud of her shield making contact reverberated throughout my swarm, and the dragon let out a roar that I could only interpret as pain as the edge of the bottom spoke slammed into the base of its neck, right between the wing joints. The beast spasmed, and its wings flopped helplessly as it lost the rhythm that kept it aloft. Without that, it dropped like a stone towards the ground.
I was already racing towards it as it fell, my knife in hand.
Could I kill a dragon? I didn’t know. I wasn’t at all sure, and I was keenly aware that this was incredibly dangerous. The better idea was to just let Mash finish it off, whack it over the head until she smashed its brains or whatever. A gross way to end the thing, but letting a dragon rampage throughout the French countryside sounded like something we weren’t supposed to let happen.
But some part of me needed to know. Was I strong enough? Was my knife, hodgepodge mess of magecraft and tinkertech that it was, powerful enough to hurt it?
The dragon landing shook the ground beneath my feet, but I kept running. It wasn’t far, and as long as I was fast enough…
I wasn’t. The dragon remained stunned for only a few seconds, and even running full tilt, I couldn’t cross the distance in enough time. It was already starting to stir.
“Mash! Keep it down!”
Mash landed atop one of its wings with a crunch, driving her heels into the joint where the bones were weakest, and as the dragon cried out, she flipped up, took hold of her shield with both hands, and slammed it down into the ground next to the dragon’s neck. The left spoke came down on the beast’s neck like a hammer, driving it back to the earth with another thud that left it dazed.
I didn’t have time to inspect it, but as I raced towards it, in some distant, faraway place, I was surprised at how small it turned out to be. Big, still big, but not any larger than one of Bitch’s dogs. I clambered astride the neck as quickly as I could, my heart thundering in my ears, took hold of my knife with both hands, and drove the tip towards the base of the skull, right at the top of the spine. A killshot.
It skidded off. The scales were just too strong.
My options ran through my mind at light speed. There weren’t many. If my knife couldn’t get through its tough hide and its mouth was filled with dangerous, sharp teeth and a breath that could burn the flesh off my bones, where else could I attack it? Where else would it be vulnerable?
If it worked on Lung…
The fingers of one hand wrapped around one of the horns protruding from its head as I threw myself forward and drove my knife into one of its eyes.
After a moment of resistance, the blade sank in like butter.
The beast bucked beneath me, tossing its head back, roaring, and I had to wrap my legs around its neck to keep from being thrown off. The horns threatened to skewer me, and I was keenly aware of the one jutting out past my hip that would gut me with one wrong move, but somehow, I managed to stay on.
“Miss Taylor!” Mash called.
I ignored her, twisting the nanothorn dagger in the soft tissue of the beast’s eye with a savage wrench, and then my thumb flicked the switch to turn it on.
Blood spewed forth, splattering over my hand and fingers in a fine, crimson mist. My dagger sank deeper in, and the dragon’s thrashing grew worse as I clung to it with all my strength, trying to keep its undulating neck from tossing me off. The hum of the nanothorns was all but unnoticeable under the noise of the beast’s suffering.
Deeper and deeper my dagger went, further and further into the skull until my hand was wrist deep into its eye socket, and then, suddenly, the dragon jerked and collapsed, every part of it sagging into the dirt like a puppet whose strings had been cut. My entire torso rocked forward, and the smooth, rounded shaft of the threatening horn pressed hard against my side, like a warning of just how close I’d come to a mortal wound myself
I held, for a moment, heart still pounding, pressing my dagger ever deeper and keeping it there just to make sure.
But the dragon didn’t stir, didn’t so much as twitch, and it had gone completely silent. It wasn’t even breathing anymore.
It was dead.
My finger flicked the switch again, and the dagger turned off as I slowly extracted it from out of the creature’s head with a sickening squelch. When I looked down at it, the entire thing was coated in blood and small bits of vaguely pink blobs that I didn’t really want to think too hard about. My sleeve was red almost up to the elbow.
Something curled in my belly. It felt like accomplishment.
I killed a dragon.
Slowly, I extricated myself, wiggling my legs out from under the dragon’s neck — my shins were definitely bruised, I realized with a wince, and I was going to be feeling it for quite a while. It was probably a miracle I hadn’t broken anything.
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But I couldn’t be too upset about that. I killed a dragon. A real one, not an imitation like Lung. A beast of legend, a creature of myth, and sure, Mash had been the one to bring it to the ground, but I dealt the killing blow.
For just a moment, I felt strong again, powerful, in a way I hadn’t since Gold Morning. I was Skitter, I was Weaver, the cape who faced down all comers and never lost, even if she didn’t win. I wasn’t the no name spellcaster struggling to catch up to her peers, I was the girl who stood against the end of the world and gave it the middle finger.
“Whoa.”
I smoothed my expression out as the twins came over, eyes wide and staring at me. I felt hyper aware of the blood dripping from my right hand and my knife, the red stains that coated my sleeve, as I turned to face them. They gaped openly and unabashedly at the corpse behind me.
“Senpai really did kill a dragon by carving out its eyes,” Ritsuka breathed.
“I thought she was exaggerating,” Rika admitted. “Senpai really is a badass.”
A muscle in my cheek jumped as Mash came over to join us. I hadn’t realized the twins had taken that brief bit I’d mentioned to Cúchulainn so completely to heart. It must have sounded pretty ludicrous at the time, after all.
“Th-that was incredibly reckless!” Mash scolded me. “Even if it was just a wyvern —”
My brow furrowed. “Just a wyvern?”
That brought Mash up short, like she’d forgotten that my education in magic and magecraft was much shorter and less comprehensive than hers or the rest of Team A’s.
“Wyverns are a subspecies of dragon, Miss Taylor,” she explained slowly. “Thaumaturgically, they’re not considered true dragons, because their mystery is weaker, although they share many of the same innate traits.” She bit her lip worriedly, and her face twisted as she looked behind me at the fallen beast. “If our enemy had been a true dragon, I’m not sure any of us would have been able to harm it at all.”
The sense of triumph in my gut soured. My grip on the nanothorn dagger tightened.
So. I’d gotten myself all hyped up for nothing, huh? Taylor the Dragonslayer. In the end, it was nothing more than a worthless fantasy cooked up by my own ignorance.
I looked back at the wyvern, still just as dead.
Saying “all that effort” like we’d fought a long and arduous battle wasn’t quite right, but I’d had a hard enough time doing anything at all to it. My swarm was useless, nothing more than a distraction, and my knife had made it through, but only the soft tissues of the eye. Now might be a good time to test it, see if I could carve off its scales with the nanothorns active, but did it lose mystery at the moment of death, because it was no longer a fearsome, unstoppable monster? That might be a worthless thing as well.
An approaching presence jerked me out of my thoughts, and I looked up at the soldiers cautiously approaching from inside Vaucouleurs as a fly landed on the leader’s back. Mash, seeing my attention shift, followed my gaze, and when she saw the soldiers coming closer, weapons raised, she held up one of her hands and took a step towards them.
“Monsieur,” she began. “Excuse me, but we are travelers —”
“Back!” the leader shouted, brandishing a spear. Both it and his voice shook. “Stay back, heathen! Begone from this place with your witchcraft and sorcery! W-we’ll have none of that, here!”
Mash blinked. “Witchcraft?”
“Do you think none of us saw you summon that infernal swarm? Get back! Go! Leave this place!”
Slowly, she stepped backwards until she was next to me, but she didn’t go any farther. To protect me? Even if I didn’t really need it against a bunch of ordinary soldiers, I still appreciated the thought.
“The ley line?” I muttered to her.
“There should be a spot somewhere outside the village, as well,” she whispered back. “It won’t be as convenient as lodgings here, but we could set up camp there, if we have to.”
The lead soldier thrust his spear at us threateningly. “Go! Leave! Now!”
“I’d say we have to.”
She nodded. “Okay,” she said louder, to the soldier, “we’ll leave peacefully.”
Carefully, we backed up until we reached the twins.
“Senpai?” Ritsuka asked quietly. “Mash?”
“There should be another ley line terminal somewhere in the forest outside the city,” I summarized for him. “The soldiers think we used witchcraft to summon an evil swarm of bugs, so we’ll have to camp out there instead of in Vaucouleurs itself.”
“That was us, right?” Rika asked.
“Yes, but it wasn’t magic.”
“Then what —”
“Now isn’t the time,” I cut across her. “We can discuss that sort of thing later. For now, we need to leave, before those soldiers’ desperation overwhelms their fear.”
The twins nodded. “Right.”
Carefully, we all backed up, keeping Mash in front of us in case one of the soldiers got particularly brave, and we kept going until we’d reached the treeline again and Vaucouleurs and its soldiers disappeared behind the foliage.
“Now what?” Ritsuka asked.
I turned to our resident Demi-Servant. “Mash?”
She pursed her lips, and an instant later, her shield disappeared like a mirage. Returned to spirit form, I realized after a second, because regular Servants could do that with both themselves and their gear. I hadn’t known Mash could, because she was obviously a living person and a Servant simultaneously, but then there was a lot I didn’t know about how a Demi-Servant was supposed to work. I wasn’t sure anyone else, even the Director, did either.
Mash reached out and pushed aside some of the foliage. “This way,” she said. “Follow me, please.”
We ducked under the canopy and left the beaten path to enter the forest proper, following Mash as she led us towards where she sensed the ley lines converging. Not for the first time, I wished my training in magecraft was more complete, that I’d had more time to learn the things most magi took for granted. Being able to sense out the ley lines beneath my feet would have been an invaluable skill, both then and in Fuyuki.
We made a beeline through the trees, and through my bugs and the galaxy of lights in my head that represented them, I felt us skirt around Vaucouleurs. The soldiers had retreated back into the fort, and as we got closer and I could send more bugs to recon the inside, a nasty picture started to form for me.
We’d been expecting a small town, a thriving place with a contingent of soldiers there to protect it. What I saw instead was little better than a mass grave, building upon building — those that were still standing, anyway — filled with people with varying and various injuries. Most of them were soldiers, wrapped in bloodied linens and disfigured in some way or form. The lucky ones were intact, but for gashes torn into their flesh. The unlucky ones didn’t bear mentioning.
What happened to this place? Had there been a battle that broke out, and these were the injured leftover? Or…
A chill went down my spine.
Was that not the only time they’d been attacked by a wyvern? In that case, was the one I’d killed the only one, or were there more, terrorizing the French countryside?
A better question might be where a bunch of wyverns would have come from, since this was definitely too far outside the time when such things had supposedly lived in this world. How had Marie put it? With the advancing of mankind’s supremacy, the mystics of the ages past retreated to the inner sea. Whatever that meant. I didn’t need to understand the fine mechanics of it to get the general idea that things like dragons and unicorns had all but disappeared past a certain point in history, and the fifteenth century was definitely long past that point.
Eventually, our little group came through the trees and found ourselves in the middle of a small clearing, where there sat —
“A campfire?” Ritsuka asked incredulously.
Not anymore, but little tufts of smoke were rising from the blackened logs, piled on top of each other and arranged in the center of the clearing, away from anything else flammable. Cautiously, I stepped closer and reached out, waving my hand as close to the charred wood as I dared. If the lingering smoke hadn’t convinced me, what I felt there did.
“It’s still warm,” I confirmed.
“Someone else was here before?” Mash said lowly.
“Yes, I was,” a new voice interrupted.
Mash and I both leapt, startled, as she summoned her shield and my hand went to my dagger, and we whirled around towards the voice to find a young woman, dressed in purple cloth and gleaming silvery armor. Her long, blonde hair was tied into a thick braid that was just way too long to be practical.
She smiled at us sheepishly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Who —”
“She’s a Servant!” Mash said urgently.
I glanced at her, and then back to the young woman. The only way she could have managed to get that close as a Servant without either Mash or Romani detecting her was if she was —
“An Assassin?”
The young woman blinked, and her hands came up in a placating gesture as she shook her head vigorously. “W-wait a second, I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding!”
Beep-beep!
“Everyone, I’m detecting a Servant nearby!” Romani told us. “Their presence is incredibly weak and diminished, but it’s definitely a Servant!”
He stopped and looked at the young woman. Silence hung in the air for a second.
“Ah?”
“Maybe if I explained things?” she offered with a tentative smile. Slowly, she lowered her arms and pressed one hand between her, ah, large tracts of land, which were for some reason unarmored while gleaming plate covered her midsection. “Yes, I am a Servant of the Ruler class. My true name is Jeanne d’Arc.”
“What?” Romani blurted out.
“It’s true!” the young woman insisted. “Ah, the reason you might have trouble sensing me… Yes, for some reason, my performance is much lower than it should be. All of my stats have been ranked down for reasons I can’t explain, and a lot of the unique abilities of the Ruler class that I’m supposed to have are missing. For example, the anti-Servant Command Spells and the ability to reveal the true names of other Servants I encounter.”
If those were the sorts of advantages Rulers could expect, maybe summoning one of them should have been my goal, instead of one of the Knight classes. That sort of thing sounded invaluable.
“Have you encountered other Servants, here?” I asked sharply.
The young woman who claimed to be Jeanne shook her head. “No. I was only summoned into this era a few hours ago, so I’m afraid I’m not even sure what’s going on with this Holy Grail War. A lot of the information I should have been provided by the Grail seems to be missing entirely. It’s been a bit of a godsend that I was summoned into a time and place I’m familiar with, because I can at least speak the language.”
I shared a look with Mash, and then I turned to the twins. “Ritsuka, Rika, what do you see with Master’s Clairvoyance?”
They both squinted at Jeanne, frowning, and after a moment, shook their heads.
“Ruler class Servant, Jeanne d’Arc,” Ritsuka reported. “Revelation, Charisma, and Saint, although the last one is sealed. It looks like she is who she says she is, Senpai.”
Slowly, we all relaxed, and Jeanne’s tentative smile became broader and more open.
“Mademoiselle Jeanne?” Romani said. “I think there’s some things we need to talk about, before we get ahead of ourselves.”
And so he explained Chaldea, our mission, what we were doing there and why. The Grand Order, Singularities and what little we knew about how they functioned, what they were and what they did, the proposed existence and role of the Holy Grail in making them, everything relevant to the situation.
“There are some things we just can’t say for sure, yet,” he finished, “but we can at least make some educated guesses. Do you have any questions?”
“It’s a lot to take in, I’ll admit,” she said at length, “but no, I think I understand all of the important parts, ah, Doctor Roman?”
“Doctor Roman is fine,” he assured her.
“So the reason I don’t have most of the abilities I could expect in a Holy Grail War is because this isn’t strictly a Holy Grail War?”
“If you loosen the description to ‘any conflict with the Holy Grail as its central prize,’ then you could call it one, but yes, this isn’t really a Holy Grail War like the ritual in Fuyuki, Japan. The Holy Grail is still the prize, but technically speaking, this whole thing started when someone ‘won’ it.”
“It would definitely explain a lot,” Jeanne muttered.
“What about you?” I asked. “Do you have any information about what’s going on in this Singularity? What point of history has been overturned?”
She scowled. “Unfortunately, I don’t know as much as I would like to. However… Yes, there are a few things I managed to find out in the few hours I’ve been here.” She took a deep breath. “Firstly, my living self was executed only a short time ago. In fact, it seems to have been only about a week. This might be why my abilities are diminished, since my legend is so ‘new.’ Secondly, as the point of divergence… King Charles VII has been killed, and Jeanne d’Arc was the one who killed him.”
Silence met this statement.
“What?” Romani croaked.
“You didn’t…” I started, but I wasn’t sure how to articulate the question in my head.
How did you ask a woman whether she killed the man she dedicated, sacrificed her life for? Jeanne d’Arc gave up everything in order to see Charles VII crowned; the idea that she would turn around and kill him seemed like something out of a Master-Stranger horror story.
“No,” Jeanne confirmed. “Based upon what I was able to hear, Jeanne d’Arc lived and died here according to proper human history, as you call it. However, a few days after she was executed, a woman bearing her face and name, my face and name, appeared. She attacked Orléans, slaughtered the entire city to a man, and slew King Charles VII and every single member of his court.”
Orléans and King Charles VII… Her entire history was bundled up into that. The two greatest accomplishments of her relatively short career were ending the English occupation of Orléans and ensuring Charles VII made it to the throne. It was quite literally what she’d given her life for, after a fashion.
I eyed her, looking for any sign that the news had gotten to her, but she didn’t seem particularly upset or distressed. She might have been planning another military campaign with the French army instead of telling us that her life’s work had been all for nothing, for all the difference it seemed to make to her.
If it had been me, being told that a woman wearing my face and name had gone and crushed the refugees of Gold Morning just days after I killed Scion… I wasn’t sure I would have been anywhere near that calm.
Jeanne’s lips drew tight. “They also say…that as part of her pact with the Devil to gain new life, she also gained a sorcery that allowed her to summon legions of dragons to do her bidding.”