Chapter XLI: Another Brick in the Road

It turned out that "fast enough" was actually really fast.

I had no idea if it was even her top speed, because the distance we had to travel wasn't far enough that I thought she was going all out, but it was less than a minute between her setting her horses into motion and then slowing back down as we approached the coastline. Way, way faster than even the theoretical top speed of Da Vinci's special e-bikes.

"H-here is fine!" I told her as we pulled up alongside it. I was embarrassed to realize that my voice had squeaked a little, because the acceleration had just caught me that badly off guard.

Fortunately, whatever protective magic there was to the chariot made enough of a shield to blunt the wind shear as we moved at least in half, so neither I nor the twins had been thrown off. Small mercies.

"Are you sure?" Boudica asked, looking over at me.

I nodded back to her, perhaps a little faster than I would have under different circumstances. Up above, my ravens trailed far behind us, struggling to even stay inside my range for their control. Another small mercy that they weren't limited to the range of my bugs, because I was pretty sure I would have lost them halfway here otherwise.

"The crabs we need won't be all in one place," I said by way of explanation. "I'm going to need to gather them slowly as I go up the coast."

"That makes sense," Boudica agreed, and she pulled on the reins to command her horses to stop. Neighing as though to acknowledge her commands, their gallop slowed to a trot for maybe half a dozen yards, and then to a halt.

My knees were a little shaky as I climbed down out of the…I was just going to call it a carriage, because I didn't know the proper term. Ritsuka and Rika, who climbed down from beside me, didn't seem much better, wide-eyed and windswept.

"I'm alive!" Rika cried exultantly, throwing up her hands.

"I'm sorry, I didn't think about how hard that kind of speed might be on you," Boudica apologized.

Behind us, Aífe's chariot trundled to a stop, too, carrying Arash, Mash, and Emiya, with Mash looking a little surprised at how fast they'd been going, but Arash and Emiya completely unfazed. I had to keep my eyes averted from the majesty of the horses pulling it, because even someone as inexperienced with magic as I was could recognize something unearthly about them, and if I admired them for too long, I might not stop.

"I-it's fine," Ritsuka told Boudica shakily, "I just don't think we were expecting your chariot to be that fast."

"Even mortal horses transcend such limits when they reach the Throne," Aífe called from the carriage of her chariot. With a distinct note of pride, she gestured to her own horses — one a pure white and the other a stunningly vivid russet red — and added, "My Bán Epona and Rúad Étaín would put them all to shame."

That much, I wasn't sure I believed. Sure, they were very beautiful horses, and they were very obviously far from ordinary, even disregarding that they must have been a part of Aífe's Noble Phantasm, but my sample size for Riders so far contained just two, and they were both right here. I couldn't pass judgment either way.

"They really are very pretty," said Rika, sounding like she very much wanted to go up and pet them but didn't think she was allowed.

"Funny how the myths don't mention that part," Emiya chuckled. "You'd think it would be more relevant that you have a pair of Divine Beasts pulling your chariot."

"These are divine horses?" Mash asked, shocked.

She took the words right out of my mouth, I thought as I made my way down to the coast, just shy of the edge of the water. Under the surface, starting about ten feet down and extending to about a hundred feet down, there was a…colony, for lack of a better word, of European Green Crabs.

Divine horses. No wonder they seemed so impossibly majestic.

"You hadn't figured that out?" asked Emiya. "Bán Epona and Rúad Étaín — Epona's White and Étaín's Red. They're both animal goddesses associated with horses."

"Wow," said Mash. "Then, Miss Aífe, were they a gift or a blessing of some kind?"

Aífe chuckled, low and throaty, and I didn't need to turn to look to imagine the savage grin that was becoming her trademark. "Not hardly. I took these horses through conquest, as the spoils of victory."

"In other words," Emiya said dryly, "she sought out Epona and Étaín, beat them up, and took their stuff."

"Did you think my sister was the only one who spent her youth seeking out the strongest enemies to challenge?" Aífe retorted. "When you've reached the pinnacle of human strength, what else is there better to test your strength against than the gods themselves?"

"That sounds exactly like you," said Boudica. "It seems a miracle that you managed to stay put for more than an hour inside that castle."

I set the crabs to gathering, pulling as many of them as I could and directing them to come to the surface. Since this was a Singularity and everything would reset back to normal once we were gone, I didn't worry too much about decimating the population. In the first place, if there were this many right here, I could only imagine there were even more along the rest of the coast. This would make a dent, but not a crippling one.

"I told you," said Aífe, "my days of marauding and wanderlust are past."

Slowly, I began to walk up the coast, making sure to keep my pace just slow enough for the crabs on the back edge of my range to stay within it even as more began to enter the front end. I didn't bother keeping close track on the exact numbers, because having extra wouldn't hurt, considering how important getting the Director her body back was.

"I've actually been wondering, Queen Boudica," said Ritsuka. "Um, if you don't mind me asking, that is, why you're fighting on the side of the Roman Empire."

"It must come across as strange," Boudica agreed. "And just Boudica is fine, Ritsuka. As for how an enemy of the Empire who swore revenge against it on the names of her gods became a Roman general…"

She trailed off. Perhaps sensing that he had stepped into dangerous waters, Ritsuka rushed to assure her, "It's fine if you don't want to answer."

Boudica laughed a little. "No, no," she reassured him, "it's not like it's particularly painful or anything. I mean, it's true, I was tempted. Here I was, summoned back to life less than a year after my death, with all the targets of my wrath well in sight and utterly unable to stop me. I could have brought the entire Empire low, killed Emperor Nero, and satisfied the lust for vengeance that burned so hot in my blood. But…"

She trailed off again. At length, she continued, "I'm still not sure why I didn't. Maybe I felt guilty for all of those people in Londinium who were innocent victims of my rampage. Or maybe it's just a part of my nature to fight to protect something instead of tearing it down. It just felt more…right, fighting on behalf of the Empire's citizens, instead of letting the United Empire rip them apart."

A slight hitch in my step was the only evidence of the pause that gave me. A strange feeling swirled in my gut, something like nostalgia only not quite, and I couldn't give it a name.

Good grief. Where were you during Gold Morning?

"I guess that's what it means to be a Heroic Spirit," said Mash thoughtfully. "A symbol of strength that denies villainy and upholds righteousness."

Boudica laughed, but there was a tinge of self-deprecation to it.

"I don't know about that," she admitted. "At the end of the day, my feelings for Nero and the Roman Empire haven't disappeared. I'm not doing this for the sake of Nero or the Roman Empire at all, and calling myself their ally would be wrong in a number of ways. I just…hate the United Empire more."

"You're putting aside your feelings for the greater good," I said appreciatively.

"I think that's a good way of putting it," Boudica agreed.

I didn't know if I could compare myself to her. So much of my career had just been an escalating train of shit, to the point that the earlier parts of it had seemed so small and insignificant by comparison. Lung and I, for example, would never be friends, but by the end, he was the one who felt stronger about what had passed between us than I did.

But I could at least appreciate the kind of person it took to look past all of your grudges to deal with a bigger problem. Those had been in frighteningly short supply during Gold Morning.

"We're not saints, Mash," Arash cut in. He paused, thought about that for a second, probably remembered Jeanne, and then corrected himself, "Well, most of us aren't, at least. Being Servants can give us some perspective on things that happened while we were alive, but it doesn't erase the feelings we have about those things. For someone like me, who had no connection to the Roman Empire either way, fighting to preserve it for the sake of history isn't hard. On the other hand, for someone who was wronged by the Empire during their life, it can be a challenge just to set aside those feelings long enough to even think about it."

"I guess I understand," said Mash. "But in that case…Miss Boudica, doesn't that make what you're doing all that much more impressive?"

"Well, I don't know about that," Boudica replied. "I'm just doing what feels right to me. If that means I'm doing the right thing for the world, then I guess that's all the better."

As they talked, I continued slowly up the coastline, and for whatever reason, they followed me. Down by the waterline, the calm surface began to froth and foam as my crabs began to breach and clamber up onto the grass.

"Whoa," said Rika. "That's a lot of crabs."

"Mash," I called over my shoulder, "get the circle set up, so we can connect with Da Vinci?"

She paused a moment, and by the motion of the bug I'd stuck back on her, she was looking about. "Um, where should I…"

"Anywhere you can find room." I glanced back at Aífe. "Aífe, we're going to need to stabilize it again."

She snorted. "In other words, you want my runes again."

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"Yes."

I paused mid-step for a second and then stopped as a thought occurred to me. "Actually," I began as I rooted through my pocket, "not just with the circle, either."

My fingers curled around the last remaining runestone from Fuyuki, and without looking, I tossed it towards her. There was a meaty smack as she snapped it out of the air deftly, and a moment of silence as she inspected it. I started walking again.

"Where did you get this?" she asked seriously. "This is one of the Primordial Runes."

"Cúchulainn carved several for us back in the Fuyuki Singularity," I answered without breaking stride. "I've used up all but that last one."

"And now you want more."

"Yes." I didn't beg. I didn't butter her up. I didn't let her see even a hint of desperation of any kind. A woman like her didn't respect any sign of weakness, so I didn't show her any. "Originally, I didn't expect to have the chance to get more until if or when we ran into Cúchulainn again, but if you can carve the same sorts of runes that he can, then we won't have to wait."

"If, you say," Aífe grunted indignantly. "Having seen me use them before, do you have any reason to doubt it?"

"I wouldn't know," was what I told her. "The only frame of reference I have for runic magic is you, him, and Director Animusphere, and while yours and his are obviously better than the Director's, telling the difference between you two is harder. After all, he was a Caster, so rune magic was all he used, and you're a Rider."

Contrary to what I was expecting, some part of what I said made Aífe burst out into laughter, and my bugs buzzed a little in the background as I kept my confusion off of my face.

"A Caster?" she chortled. "The Hound, summoned as a Caster? Well, I suppose he could qualify, if only on technicality. But oh, how that must have rankled! To have to fight without either his spear or his chariot or even his sword!"

"He did well enough," I said neutrally. I felt like maybe I should defend him more, but I wasn't quite sure what I was defending him from. "He was…instrumental in defeating the corrupted King Arthur of that Singularity."

For an instant, I half-expected Lancelot to pop up and demand answers, but no, we'd left him back at Joyous Guard with Connla.

"Really?" asked Arash. "I hadn't heard about that. Come to think of it, we never really talked about the Fuyuki Singularity, did we?"

No, we actually hadn't, had we? I wasn't sure he hadn't read the after action reports, but as for the events themselves, no one had thought to bring them up over the course of the month we'd spent preparing for Septem. Ritsuka and Rika might have told Bradamante while I wasn't there, but the topic hadn't really come up with the other Servants.

An oversight. Keeping all of our Servants up to date about what had happened in prior Singularities was going to be something we had to do, going forward, if only so everyone was up to speed on what kind of threats we'd faced before and what kind of threats we might expect to face in the future.

"We were caught off guard," said Mash. "Professor Lev's sabotage… The Rayshift into Fuyuki was unplanned and haphazard. Cúchulainn was the only uncorrupted Servant remaining there, and he helped us the whole way through, despite being outnumbered and outclassed by Saber, Lancer, and Archer. I don't know if we would have made it without him."

Aífe huffed. "To be expected. The Hound is at his most resourceful when disadvantaged."

"Cú was pretty great," Rika said with uncharacteristic quiet.

"Yeah," Ritsuka agreed.

"Fou," the little gremlin on Mash's shoulder mewled mournfully.

There went the hope that it had run off and gotten itself killed. For whatever reason, it had made itself scarce while we were at Joyous Guard, and I had no idea where it had squirreled itself away, but now that we'd left, it had come back.

"Miss Taylor," said Mash, "is here okay?"

"As long as you have room," I answered her, and then I stopped, reconsidered, and looked back at her and the spot of the road — really more of a beaten path than an actual road — she was gesturing to. "You're going to want a bigger circle," I added. "We need to fit all of the crabs inside of it."

"Oh." Mash blinked and looked towards the ground, brow furrowing. "That's right, it needs to be bigger than the last one."

"I'll handle it, Mash," said Emiya, stepping forward. To me, he asked, "These crabs, they're about how big?"

"About…" I did some quick math in my head as my powers gave me a better sense of their anatomy. "Ten centimeters wide, on average, maybe three quarters of that long. Each leg is about a single body length long."

Helpfully, I had one of the crabs scuttle up towards him and wave its pincer at him. He grimaced down at it, but didn't comment as he eyed the thing critically, like he was trying to peer straight through its carapace and into its internal organs. As far as I knew, his form of Clairvoyance wasn't actually strong enough for that, but Servants were complete bullshit as it was, so I didn't question it.

After a moment of intense scrutiny, he nodded to himself, held out his hand, and intoned, "Trace, on."

Like in the courtyard against Aífe, a collection of swords formed in the air, eight in total, pointed straight down. With a flick of his wrist, they fell towards the ground, although with the speed and intensity, it might have been more accurate to say they shot down, and with a series of squelches not unlike the bite of a shovel, they embedded themselves tip-first into the dirt, forming a perfect octagon.

No, I realized after a moment, not an octagon. There was space between the blades, plenty of it, and if you were to trace a curve from the edge of one blade to the other all the way around, it would make a perfect circle with a diameter of about ten feet.

It would unquestioningly have been more impressive if he had carved a perfect magic circle all at once, fit to match the diagram Marie had shown me for the summoning array used by Chaldea's FATE system, but even this much was…not an insignificant thing.

With a wave of his hand, the swords disappeared, leaving behind the thin lines they had carved into the ground.

"Sorry I couldn't do more," said Emiya, "but I think these are fine as guide lines, don't you?"

"Ah!" said Mash. "Yes, of course! Thank you, Emiya!"

Her shield formed in her hands, and using the bottom edge once again, she began slowly, carefully connecting Emiya's lines with an arcing curve, and the circle began to take shape. Leaving her to it, I started walking again, even as numerous crabs skittered up out of the water to form neat rows in the grass a short distance away, a mass of muddy green waiting to be swept away.

"You know, I don't think that's ever going to stop being creepy," Ritsuka remarked.

"With Senpai, you don't catch the crabs, the crabs catch you," said Rika.

I left them behind and kept walking, but I moved slowly enough that I didn't go very far very fast. I watched through my bugs — and now through the eyes of the gathering crabs — as Mash finished the circle from the inside and carefully stepped out of it. Aífe stepped up next, and with the tips of the index and middle fingers of one hand glowing, she drew a circle in the air.

A quick flash lit up the group, momentarily blinding the crabs, and the circle Mash had just carved glowed with the same light as Aífe's fingertips. Then, she stepped over the glowing line and into the circle, and with those same fingers, she began to meticulously carve the same runes she'd used to stabilize our conversation with Romani back in Joyous Guard's courtyard.

As she worked, I continued to pull more crabs in from the…estuary, Romani had called it, coaxing them out of the sand and the mud as I puppeted their bodies all at once. When they made it to the surface, they marched to join the growing group that was watching Aífe work, surreptitiously studying the runes she was using and how she inscribed them.

There was more to runic magic than just the inscription of the rune. Marie had imparted that much. The meaning behind each rune, the method of inscription, the way the strokes were made, the order they were made in, there were numerous factors that went into making them more than some squiggly lines. There was no way I could learn the full breadth and depth of Aífe's runes without direct instruction from her.

But that didn't mean I couldn't learn anything at all by watching her.

If she suspected me at all, she didn't give any indication. I wasn't sure she would care even if she did know, or if she would be amused by my attempts at gleaning the knowledge from her, and I wasn't sure it would matter either way, because I wasn't learning much, no matter how many eyes I watched with from how many angles.

There were no shortcuts worth taking in the study and application of magecraft, Marie had once told me. It seemed that applied to more than just what she'd been trying to teach me at the time.

Despite my earlier insistence that I didn't care about counting the crabs, the way my powers worked made it impossible not to know, and when I realized that I was going to reach my quota quicker and easier than I originally assumed, I started to ignore the crabs deeper down in favor of the ones closer to the shore. It was only about thirty feet away from where I'd left everyone else that I reached and then exceeded the six dozen Da Vinci had asked for, because there were just that many of the things.

If I had to take a guess, without humans firmly established around here to catch them, there weren't many natural pressures to thin the population. The only thing that stopped them from carpeting the entire seabed was probably simple food scarcity.

Once the last few stragglers made it ashore and close enough I wouldn't lose them, I turned back around and made my way back to the group, where Aífe was drawing the final set of runes along the inside edge of our makeshift magic circle.

When she was done, she stood and looked back at me, then smirked. "It seems we both finished around the same time."

"There were more crabs around here than I was expecting," I said by way of explanation.

I turned to Mash. "Ready?"

Mash, who had been watching the tide of crabs arrive and neatly arrange themselves into tight rows with a kind of morbid curiosity, blinked, turned back to me, and nodded. "Oh! Yes, Miss Taylor."

The crabs cleared out of her way as one mass, and she hesitated only a moment before stepping into the spots they'd opened up for her, into the circle, and setting her shield down. When she came back out again, taking care she didn't need to in order to avoid squashing any of them underfoot, I took my own place just outside the circle and thrust my arm towards that shield.

"Anfang!"

The runes and the circle they were inside both lit up with a blue light, and an instant later, Romani's image appeared in the air above the center of Mash's shield. He blinked at us.

"You're ready already? But it's barely been a couple minutes!"

"For you," I reminded him.

He blinked again, confused, and then understanding dawned across his face. "Right. Massive time differential. How could I forget? It must have been closer to half an hour for you guys." He cleared his throat. "Right. Do you have all of the crabs we need?"

I looked pointedly down at my feet, and so did Romani. His face twisted into a grimace of fascinated unease, halfway between intense interest and an unsettled curl of his lips. Like a surgeon who was staring at a strange tumor he'd never seen before.

"Yeah. I'm sure I'll get the exact numbers when we do the Rayshift, but if you say that's the six dozen she asked for, I'll take your word for it."

"Closer to eight dozen," I told him. "I thought it might be prudent to have extra, in case Da Vinci needed more than she originally estimated."

"That woman is nothing if not meticulous," said Romani, smiling faintly. He peered down at the crabs again. "But if nothing else, it might be a good idea to keep a few extra in an aquarium so that we can have a stable source of emergency meat."

"Oh, ick," said Rika.

"As long as you don't name them, it'll be fine," I told her without looking. "It's harder to eat something you've grown attached to."

"Well, in the worst case scenario, I guess we can make them the organization's mascots," Romani said amusedly. "Anyway, hang on a second, lemme check with Da Vinci…"

His hands flew across his keyboard as his fingers tapped away, and when he was done, he stopped and waited for a minute, staring intently at his monitor until it beeped to let him know he had a message.

"Da Vinci says she's all set up," he reported. "Once we get a solid lock on all the crabs we'll be bringing back here, we can get them captured."

I nodded. "I'll stack the crabs inside the circle."

I stepped back, and as I did so, I maneuvered the muddy green crabs around my steps and carefully over the line of the circle, converging them into a tightly spaced mass in concentric rings around the center. Aífe watched with vague interest, but the twins looked somewhere in the vicinity of disgusted fascination, like they didn't want to watch but couldn't stop themselves.

"You don't have to fit them all inside the circle," Romani informed me, "but as long as they're close enough and you're far enough, it should be fine. In fact, everyone, please step back and leave at least two meters of clearance between yourselves and the crabs so that we can reduce interference."

Dutifully, everyone did as he asked and gave the roiling mass of crabs a wide berth.

"That is…a lot of crabs," Boudica remarked.

It was, although not nearly as many as it probably looked like, considering the sheer multitude that still sat in the estuary within my range alone, and it was their flawless synchronicity and close proximity that gave the illusion of greater numbers. Ten feet, it turned out, was more than enough space for the ninety-six crabs I had gathered, with room to spare. I didn't even need to have them piling on top of each other to fit inside the circle.

"Everything's green," Romani remarked.

"You sure that's not all of those crabs, Doc?" Rika asked sardonically.

Romani paused, thought about that for a second, then grimaced and shook his head. "You know what I mean. All of the proper materials are in place, our sensors have a lock on ninety-six European Green Crabs, Da Vinci's special capture device is sealed and ready. Commencing transfer in three…two…one…"

And with a flash of light, each one of the crabs lit up simultaneously. Between one blink and the next, they vanished, leaving behind only Mash's shield and the circle and runes carved around it.

"Retrieval successful," Romani reported. He peered over at his console as it beeped. "And…Da Vinci's said that all of the crabs have been captured. We have what we need."

Slowly, I let out the breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding through my nostrils. Now, she could start working on building Marie a new body. Might only be one part of it, but that was how anything was done: one step at a time.

"With that out of the way, it looks like you guys can get back to your mission," he went on. "According to local time, it should be a little before noon, so if you leave soon, you should be able to make it to the next major town before nightfall."

"Right," I agreed.

"I'll keep an eye on things from here, but communications are still going to be spotty outside of Ley Line Terminals," he went on. "Be careful, be safe, and if you need anything, don't hesitate to call. I'll be here."

Where you probably should be is bed.

This wasn't the time or the place for that, though, so I left it unspoken.

"Understood."

"Good luck, everyone."

And then his image flickered and disappeared.

"You still intend to go to Rome, then?" asked Aífe.

"It's where we intended to land, but more than that, it's still probably the best place to investigate this Singularity," I answered. "Emperor Nero and the upper echelon of the Roman military probably have a lot more information about the United Empire and their Servant roster —"

"Ah!" said Boudica suddenly. "That reminds me! I meant to say so earlier, but I got distracted with everything, I'm sorry."

"Say what?" Ritsuka asked.

"Shortly before Connla came to find me, I received a message from Rome," Boudica told us. "Emperor Nero is going to be coming to the Gallian front to inspect the situation."

My eyebrows rose. "The Emperor is coming here?"

To the frontlines? I…guess I could respect a leader who led from the front — Rome seemed to have a lot of those among its emperors — but if history was to be believed, Nero had always been more of an artist first, statesmen second, and somewhere near the bottom of the list, there was his military leadership.

Someone like Julius Caesar, that made sense. He was an accomplished tactician and leader. But you didn't send a politician to be a war general.

"Not here, specifically," said Boudica, "but yes. Within the week, Emperor Nero will arrive at the base camp for the Gallian expeditionary force with a full complement of Praetorian Guards."

The twins shared a look with each other and Mash, like they weren't sure if they should believe it. They must have been thinking what I was thinking. Could we count this as a stroke of good luck? We didn't have to go all the way to Rome to talk to Emperor Nero, because Emperor Nero was coming to us. We could cut days of travel time out of our planning.

There was no way it could be that easy.

"Then that's where we need to be," I told her bluntly. "If Emperor Nero is going to be at the expeditionary force's base camp, we'll meet him there. Boudica, we need you to lead us to it."

And as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, she smiled and said, "Of course. I'd be glad to."