Chapter XLVIII: Conscription

I was expecting a man. Average height for his era, likely dark-haired, olive-skinned, dressed in the fineries of a Roman aristocrat, with maybe a cuirass sculpted to look like hard, firm abdominal muscles that he didn't actually have and a beard of some kind.

The bust I remembered featured a "chinstrap."

He would be soft around the middle, because he was an artist and an administrator, not a soldier. A bit pudgy, probably a double-chin, with the famous aquiline nose that the Romans apparently prized so much. A self-important young man of twenty-two who was really more playing at emperor than being one.

That was essentially what I'd been expecting.

I was not expecting a slip of a woman who was maybe five feet tall if she stood on the tips of her toes. I wasn't expecting the skirt of her dress to be so sheer that I could see the pure white loincloth she wore as underwear. I wasn't expecting her to be almost completely without even token armor, but for the greaves she wore on her lower legs and the gauntlets that covered her lower arms.

I most certainly wasn't expecting her to look like she was King Arthur's identical twin.

"That's just eerie," Arash commented lowly.

"That…can't really be King Arthur, can it?" Ritsuka asked, bewildered. "I-I mean, not here, not now."

But the surprise only lasted a few seconds. Yes, it was shocking, and yes, it was incredible, and yes, the resemblance was simply that uncanny.

That was all it was, though. Resemblance. Maybe, if that theory about how King Arthur was descended from the Romans was true, it was just genetics. Either way, everyone had a twin and everyone had a doppelganger, because otherwise, celebrity lookalike contests wouldn't have ever existed.

And, you know, Alexandria could never have pulled off being in two places at once.

"No." It was Aífe who said it, before I could even open my mouth. "Having never met Arthur, I can't speak about the resemblance, but I can definitely tell you that woman there is the genuine article. Not a Servant, but Emperor Nero in the flesh."

"They also sound nothing alike," I added for good measure.

The postures were different, too. King Arthur had carried herself rigidly, stonily, like a statue or a machine. She was regal in the same way as an ice sculpture — firm, frigid, and unyielding. Emperor Nero was nothing like that at all. She was loud, she was proud, and the way she moved was exaggerated and graceful. Someone who loved being the center of attention and reveled in every second of it.

She preened. That was as good a word for it as any.

"King Arthur couldn't sing," Mash mumbled, like she didn't even realize she'd even said anything, and okay, how she knew that, there was only one way. Another point in the "was definitely someone who knew King Arthur well" category, but with so many myths and legends and so many knights among them, that still didn't narrow it down by much.

Not Lancelot now, obviously, since we'd met him, and the armor looked nothing alike. The younger group, then? One of Gawain's kids? Percival's? Thoughts for later.

"You there, in the back!" Nero shouted, pointing directly at us. "The ones who are muttering to themselves like some kind of conspiracy!"

My eyebrows shot towards my hairline. Conspiracy?

"Wait, what?" Rika sputtered. "But we're not even huddled together in a back alley! Or a secret room behind the bookcase!"

Arash snorted.

"Who are you and what are you doing among my men?" Nero demanded.

My brain raced. How to defuse this one? The last thing we needed right now was for Nero to suspect we were spies or enemies. Not only did it cut off a potentially important source of information, but having to fight Rome from behind and the United Empire in front of us would be the worst possible outcome.

"They're with me, Emperor," came a voice from behind us, and Boudica walked forward, tall and straight. "I recruited them to the cause."

"Allies from afar, My Emperor," I heard Marcus clarify quietly through my swarm. "Come to destroy the United Empire to its last speck."

Nero nodded. "Mm-mm! So they are! I would still have —"

And that was about when Nero realized that Boudica's left arm was missing from just beneath the elbow on down.

"Boudica!" Nero yelped, alarmed. "Your arm!"

"Ah, yes." Boudica smiled ruefully. "I'm afraid I traded it in exchange for Spartacus's life."

"Traded it?" said Nero, brow furrowing. "With whom?"

Boudica shook her head. "It's a bit of a long story, and I've been resting while the wound heals. Could we have this conversation in my tent?"

"Of course!" Nero dismounted promptly, swinging herself off the saddle with the expert ease of a practiced rider, and almost as one, the men who rode in with her did so as well. Like it was an afterthought, she handed the reins to a nearby soldier and commanded him to, "Tend to my horse."

She took about two steps our way before she remembered that the rest of the camp was still assembled in neat rows in front of her, and she waved them aside with an impatient, "As you were."

The two lines split apart, fanning out and away from her as they went back to the tasks they'd been working on when she arrived, and she strode over to us quickly and with purpose as her honor guard fell into step behind her.

"This way, please," Boudica said as she turned on her heel and began walking back to her tent.

There was an awkward moment where none of us moved. Nero and her entourage eyed us with naked suspicion, and it was obvious the very last thing they wanted to do was to leave their backs open to us. I understood the impulse, but, well, there was just one problem with it. A pretty big problem, too.

"If we wanted to kill the Emperor, none of you would be more than a pebble in the way," Aífe told them bluntly.

Naturally, that didn't put any of them at ease, but at least it saved me from having to point it out myself.

"Wow," said Rika. "Diplomacy isn't one of your many talents, is it, Super Action Mom?"

Several of the honor guard glanced at her, bewildered, but only for a moment. I even caught one of them in the back out of the corner of my eye, mouthing the words to himself incredulously.

"She's not wrong," was all I said to rebuke her, and then I pointedly turned away from the group and started towards where Boudica had walked off to. Even with my back to them, I knew every move they made, but they didn't have to know that, did they?

The twins did a double-take, and then hurried to follow me. With one last look at the honor guard, Arash and Aífe followed suit.

Whether Nero and her soldiers viewed that apparent vulnerability as trust or confidence, I had no way of knowing. One would be more useful than the other, but I couldn't decide it for them. The only thing I could do was to try and stack the deck as much as I could however I could. I didn't have too many ideas for how to do that, but that wasn't the same as having none.

"Rika," I mumbled to her as they fell into step beside me, "tell Emiya to bring some food as soon as it's ready. Enough for all of us, plus one."

"Roger wilco, Senpai," Rika whispered back.

Now we just had to hope that we could win some trust with some really good food.

Boudica had already sat back down on her futon by the time we made it to her tent, the magic circle still glowing beneath her. Her arm kept sparkling as the missing limb slowly filled back in, but there was nothing we could do about that.

Confidence. Confidence and competence were the most important things. As long as you looked like you were in control, people would be willing to believe you were.

"Arash, Aífe, get the table," I ordered quickly, because we didn't have much time. "Ritsuka, Rika, Mash, we'll get the chairs."

The twins didn't move right away, but when Arash and Aífe picked up the table that had been moved to the back of the tent as though it weighed nothing at all (and to them, it probably did), they scrambled out of the way and followed my lead as I skirted around the outer edges and picked up the other furniture that had been sequestered away with it.

There were only five chairs, and once the table had been set down, I had them arranged around it so that mine was at the center facing towards the tent flap, with the twins and Mash flanking me, and then one last one for Nero on the opposite side. It created an us-versus-them positioning, but there was nothing to be done about that when I needed Nero to look at us as, if not equals, then valuable collaborators.

Roman emperors weren't particularly known for their humility.

Boudica watched us do the whole thing silently, and Aífe's sharp eyes observed my choices with shrewd cunning as she puzzled through them. Neither of them said anything, each for their own reasons, but I got the sense that by whatever metric they'd been using to evaluate our competence, I had just earned myself a few more points.

For whatever that wound up being worth.

I had barely gotten everyone seated properly — with Aífe and Arash behind us, looming — when Nero pushed aside the tent flap, saw us, and stopped. She blinked, eyes raking over everything, from my posture to the table to the arrangement of the seating, and her brow furrowed.

"Your Excellency," I greeted her respectfully.

"Ah?" Her brow furrowed some more. "Excellency?"

I fought the urge to grimace. Was that not the proper form of address? "Your Grace" was for dukes and duchesses, "Your Eminence" was the Pope, if I was recalling correctly, "Your Highness" for royals who weren't the current monarch, and "Your Majesty" was for the queen or king.

Or maybe I was just a lower middle class girl from the northeastern United States and had no idea how the aristocracy actually worked in old timey Europe, let alone the old Roman Empire.

"I like it!" she decided pompously. "Mm-mm! It suits me just fine!" She turned halfway and pointed at one of her honor guard. "From now on, you shall address me as 'Your Excellency!' It is only proper for my august self to be addressed by such an august title!"

The poor guard looked like he really didn't know what to make of this. "Y-yes, uh, Your Excellency. As my emperor commands."

Rika leaned over to her brother and whispered, "Did Senpai just accidentally start a trend?"

"I think she did," Ritsuka whispered back.

Lisa would be absolutely beside herself with laughter if she saw this, wouldn't she?

"Emperor Nero," I tried again, and she turned back around, smile affixed in place, "please sit. There's a lot that we have to discuss." I glanced behind her pointedly. "I'm afraid there isn't much room for your guards, either."

That got a reaction — from the guards, who bristled, probably thinking this was a blatant attempt to get the emperor alone. It was, just not so we could assassinate her.

"My Emperor," one of them began.

"Your Excellency," Nero interjected.

The guard hesitated, then started again, "Your Excellency, we are here solely for your protection —"

"It's fine." She waved him off, and with only a short glance, pointed out two of them. "You and you. Two guards should be an acceptable compromise, yes?"

"Yes," I answered immediately.

It wasn't like it made that much of a difference. I just didn't want the headache of trying to squeeze so many people inside this tent and having to field the inevitable questions when we got them. Nero would almost certainly have some, but having to answer her guards' questions too was only going to get tedious.

The rest of her honor guard spread out, and through my swarm, I observed them as they surrounded the tent, posting men at every corner and halfway between each. Those who weren't needed for that spread out further, establishing a perimeter around the tent, and that left the final two that Nero had picked out. They took up a post behind her to either side, flanking the slit of the tent flaps, stony-faced and solemn as they had been before.

Nero sat down like she noticed none of this. She seemed a little…airheaded, so maybe she really didn't. Like she lived in a different reality.

A space-case leading our side's war effort really didn't sound appealing to me.

"Let me begin by introducing us," I said, trying for diplomatic. I reached for the foggy memory of negotiating with the villains moving into Brockton after Leviathan's attack, although that had really been more of a dictating of terms, hadn't it? "I'm Taylor. To my right are Ritsuka and Rika." They both smiled nervously, and Rika gave a hesitant little wave. "To my left is Mash."

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"Pleased to meet you, Your Excellency," Mash said, bowing as much as she was able to, seated as she was.

I still wanted to know where she'd picked up so many Japanese mannerisms.

"Behind us are Arash and Aífe."

"Aha!" Nero burst out. The two men behind her twitched. "Mm-mm! Yes, that makes sense! You're that Aífe, then!"

"The one who has kept the United Empire from completely taking Gaul, yes," Aífe drawled.

"Your son was the one who told us of your position." Nero nodded, like it was all starting to make sense. I wasn't sure that it was. "He gave my men quite a bit of trouble!"

Aífe smirked. "Yes, he does have a habit of doing that, doesn't he?"

"Indeed! Some of them required weeks to heal properly!"

"We belong to an organization called Chaldea," I interjected, attempting to steer the conversation back around, "dedicated to the preservation of the proper course of human history."

"The preservation of human history?" Nero repeated, her brow furrowing.

"We're time travelers," I simplified, "from the distant future."

Rika straightened, affecting a stony, impassive, dead-eyed look, and began, "Come with us, if you want — oof!"

Her brother's elbow in her side cut her off before she could finish that ridiculous line again. She turned a dirty look on him, but he only returned it with a sharp glare. I pretended neither of them had done anything at all.

Nero rubbed at one temple. "Time travelers, you say," she muttered. "Here to preserve the proper course of history. To restore Rome to what it should be? Yes, yes, that would make sense, wouldn't it?" She brightened with a grin. "Then, you must be here to defeat the United Empire!"

"As Marcus said," I agreed.

"Marcus said that? When?" Rika asked her brother quietly.

"It must have been when he leaned over to Emperor Nero earlier," Ritsuka replied.

"So he did!" said Nero brightly, having apparently missed their entire exchange. "That would make us allies, then!"

"To an extent," I allowed, because I wasn't about to agree to join her army and help her conquer the world or whatever. "We're here for the United Empire. To defeat their Servants and retrieve the Holy Grail they're using to alter history. As long as that's the goal, we can work together."

"Servants?" Nero asked.

I sucked a deep breath in through my nostrils and prepared to explain.

Mash beat me to it.

"Heroic Spirits are the spirits of great heroes who were recorded in history for their deeds," Mash explained patiently. "It's difficult, but there's a process that allows a mage to call forth those spirits in the form of Servants, who temporarily take on a physical body so they can interact with the world."

"Ah! Yes, I see!" Nero nodded. "I remember, my court mage attempted to explain such a thing to me, as well! Mm-mm! Although…I didn't really understand everything he was talking about. It all seemed like a bunch of magical tomfoolery. Best to leave that sort of thing to the mages!"

"Finally!" Rika burst out, gesturing wildly to Nero. "Someone else who understands! See, Ritsu? I'm not the only one!"

"Are you not one of these mages yourself?" Nero asked, bemused.

Rika shook her head. "Not even close! Six months ago, I was just a normal, seventeen year old girl! No magic, no monsters, no Servants! Just me and my senior year of high school!"

"I think 'normal' is pretty subjective, there," Ritsuka muttered.

Nero turned to the rest of us. Mash predicted her question.

"In terms of magecraft, Your Excellency," she said, "the only one of us who has what might be called a 'standard' education is myself. Even then, my instruction started later than, um, what I understand is normal. It wasn't…something my guardians were sure I would need to know."

A chill shivered down my spine, and a nasty feeling settled in my gut. Mash had been made a member of Team A before I was even dropped off on Chaldea's doorstep. To my knowledge, she had spent her entire life with Chaldea. She was also the only successful result of the Demi-Servant project the previous Director had started seventeen years ago.

The only reason why she wouldn't have been learning magic from the cradle was if she wasn't expected to live long enough to make use of it.

"Chaldea itself has a system in place to make the process of summoning these Servants simpler and easier," I told Nero, and then I bent the truth a little. "We have performed numerous summonings over the course of our organization's history. Arash and Emiya and even Mash are all the results of those, although Aífe, her son, Connla, and even Boudica and Spartacus are what we've taken to referring to as 'Strays.'"

None of that was strictly untrue. There had been numerous summoning attempts made at Chaldea, most of them before I'd ever joined. It was just that there were technically only two successes, prior to our little jaunt through Fuyuki, and Arash, Emiya, and Shakespeare brought the official tally up to five. But saying it the way I had gave the impression that we'd had many more successful summonings than just that, which made us look a lot more competent.

"Strays?" Nero repeated, brow furrowing. "Like pets or animals?"

"It means they were summoned by the Counter Force," I said with deliberate patience, "not a mage. They're here because, one way or another, they're the best heroes for the job. We call them 'Strays' because they have no connection to a Master giving them orders."

"The Counter Force," Nero mumbled, rubbing at her temple again. "Yes, yes, I seem to recall something about that, too. My court mage… He must be one of these Strays, as well. The Counter Force is sending me aid to keep Rome strong?"

So there were definitely more Servants summoned on Rome's side than just Aífe, Lancelot, Connla, Boudica, and Spartacus. That was a little comforting, considering how many heavyweights seemed to be arrayed against us on the United Empire's side.

"Wait!" Nero leapt to her feet, pointing behind me at Boudica. "Boudica is a Servant, too?"

"Um," Boudica said weakly, "surprise?"

"And Spartacus…"

"Him, too," Boudica confirmed reluctantly.

Nero dropped back down into her seat, her expression heartbroken. "Then, the real, living Queen Boudica…"

Boudica sighed. "Has already died, yes."

"I-I see…"

And for the first time since we'd met her, Emperor Nero seemed small. Her personality had filled up the room and expanded outwards around her, boisterous, exuberant, and so much larger than life, and now it was shrunken and subdued. Like she'd just been told her best friend had died.

"Then…all of those things in the reports I received…"

"Have already come to pass."

Nero's fingers gripped the edge of the table tight, so tight that her perfectly manicured nails scraped along the wood, and the table itself groaned from the strength of her grip.

I had to readjust my expectations and my assumptions. The historians seemed to think that Queen Boudica's suffering and the Iceni's mistreatment were all, if not orchestrated, then done with Nero's tacit approval. The way Boudica had talked certainly hadn't given me any reason to assume otherwise.

Now, however, it was looking like she was just another cog ground down by the Roman machine, and Nero herself hadn't known anything about it until it was all over and done with. When messages and reports could take weeks or even months to go from one end of Rome to the capital, maybe that wasn't so hard to believe after all.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the time or the place for Nero to brood about a tragedy that slipped by under her nose, and I wasn't the person to be trying to help her work through her feelings about it.

"That was one of the questions we were hoping you might be able to answer for us," I told her. "That is, if and who any other Stray Servants might have been summoned to help Rome, and whether you had any information on the number and identity of the United Empire's Servants."

"I-I see…" She perked up a little. "Yes, of course, it's only natural that you would seek out my august self for help! There's no one better!"

Aífe snorted. "She has no clue, either."

"W-well, of course, matters of state are complicated!" Nero defended herself. "Even someone as magnificent as myself can't be expected to know the entirety of my empire at once!"

"She's not wrong," Arash agreed. "Rome covers almost the entirety of Europe — or it's supposed to, I mean. Even if the United Empire has cut that in half, that's still hundreds of miles from border to border. Weeks of travel to and from the capital."

"Of course!" Nero nodded. "With an empire that size, I can't be expected to know of every little thing that happens inside of it!"

My lips thinned a little, the only reaction I let show on my face. "So you don't know anything else about the United Empire's forces? Or Strays in Rome?"

Nero let out a gusty, exaggerated sigh. "Nothing at all."

"Your Excellency." One of the soldiers behind her leaned forward and down. "The wall…"

Nero's eyes lit up. "Ah! Yes, that's right! Of course, how could I have forgotten? The wall!"

"The wall?" the twins asked incredulously.

"It was one of the first signs of the United Empire to appear!" Nero announced. "One day, it simply formed out of thin air, right in the middle of western Gaul! No one had any idea where it came from!"

"Thin air?" said Ritsuka.

"A Noble Phantasm?" Mash guessed.

Or a form of magecraft. It wasn't impossible that it was something their court mage was doing, but it was frankly more likely to be a Noble Phantasm of some kind.

"Oh, right. I'd forgotten about that," said Boudica. "They moved further inland so quickly that I haven't seen it at all since that first time."

"I mean, what kind of a wall are we talking about, here?" Rika asked dubiously. "Because, like, if this is just some plaster and a wood beam or two, can't you take a sledgehammer and knock it down?"

"If it's a Noble Phantasm…" Mash began.

"Or is it, like, the Great Wall of China kind of thing?" Rika went on. "Because then you have to start talking national landmarks and if it's okay to drop a ballistic missile on top of it."

"Great Wall of China?" Nero parroted incredulously.

"A series of stone walls built to the far east by various emperors of one dynasty or another for the purposes of keeping out nomadic tribes from the west. They were later connected into a single, long structure," I summarized briefly. "Regardless of the way she asked it, Rika's question has merit. What kind of wall are we talking about here?"

Nero didn't answer. In fact, she had gone a little cross-eyed and unfocused, and I could only imagine she was trying to picture what the Great Wall of China looked like and how long it was.

Damn it, Rika.

"More the latter," said Boudica. "I'm not sure how large this Great Wall of China is, and I didn't exactly check to see how long this new wall was, but…"

"Take a guess?" I suggested.

"About six meters high," she answered. "Three meters deep. And if I had to guess how long it was? I would say that it stretched from one end of the continent to the other."

A bit of quick mental math gave me ten feet deep by twenty tall, a respectable height and more than enough to keep something like a marauding tribe on the other side of it. And if it stretched as far as Boudica thought it did…

"That's definitely a Noble Phantasm."

But who would it belong to? I couldn't recall any emperors off the top of my head who had a wall of all things as the hallmark of their rule, not so much so that it actually became a Noble Phantasm. Roads and cities, coliseums and temples, Rome had built plenty of. But walls? Specifically, fortifications for keeping people out?

"Wait a minute!" Rika burst out. "What if it is the Great Wall of China!"

"That would make the Servant…Shi Huang Di!" said Mash.

That was the only conclusion I could come to, too. If the answer wasn't one that belonged in Rome, then maybe it came from the guy who had connected the disparate wall pieces into the Great Wall. If Shi Huang Di was summoned outside of the Rider class and his Terracotta Army, it would make sense for the Great Wall to be his Noble Phantasm.

There was just one snag that I ran into with that.

"But why would he be working with Roman emperors to make the United Empire?"

Mash's mouth opened, and then slowly closed. Rika and Ritsuka didn't have an answer for that, either.

"Damn it, Senpai," Rika grumbled. "Ruining things with your logic."

"It could be Shi Huang Di," Arash interjected. "As a ruler himself, could he want to join the two kingdoms and create a single united empire that rules all of Asia and Europe?"

"Would a legend that strong be content to play second fiddle?" Aífe retorted.

We'd asked that about the Roman Emperors, too, and aside from the obvious and inexplicable "because they all decided to work together," Caesar had given us another, more plausible answer.

"If he was biding his time, maybe, to take the Grail for himself," I said. "Or if he planned for the United Empire to help him retake what used to be his empire in China."

But that only worked if Singularities could expand, because this one currently stopped at the edges of the Roman Empire. Could Singularities expand? I didn't recall that ever coming up. A question for Da Vinci, maybe.

"If it was about claiming territory, wouldn't it have moved when they pushed into Gaul?" Aífe pointed out. "I haven't seen it myself. It wasn't around Lugdunum when we retook that city, and it wasn't near Massilia when I was first summoned."

Yes, why wouldn't it move? Maybe it wasn't easy to do that once it was set, or maybe there were specific conditions that had to be met before they could, but that didn't feel quite right. If they were really determined to expand and keep what they took, then I would have thought they would wait until they had an overwhelming advantage and had taken enough land from the Roman Empire that the wall itself would cement their victory.

If they pushed into Italy and planted that wall around Rome itself, the city, then Nero wouldn't have had any other option than to surrender or die. The fact that they put it right in the middle, splitting the territory of both sides into almost perfect halves, meant that it had to be about something else, something that they needed to do before they started grabbing for land. Something like…setting up a Noble Phantasm.

"Because it's not about taking territory," I realized, "it's about establishing what's already theirs."

That was how they were keeping Constantine's Pax Romana so strong. It wasn't just about setting up territory or laying claim to land. No, they'd done something to make it so useful, so powerful, that just trying to move past the wall itself would be impossible. Something that couldn't be fought or denied. Something absolute.

They'd carved out their piece of land. Everything on the one side was theirs. Everything on the other was not.

"As long as the wall exists, everything on the other side belongs to the United Empire, and as long as everything on the other side belongs to the United Empire, Pax Romana is the law of the land."

Da Vinci was wrong, earlier. Conventional warfare would never be enough to overcome that advantage. The very existence of that wall meant that we either had to tear it down or kill the Servant who owned it to push the effects of Constanstantine's Noble Phantasm back to their capital.

And where else would the owner of that wall be than inside the capital itself? That would make another strong defensive asset that we had almost no way of reaching behind a defense that would make any fight an uphill battle. They really had stacked the deck, hadn't they?

"Then we invade!" Nero declared imperiously. "Mm-mm! I won't allow a pile of rubble to stand in my way! If they want to hide behind a wall, then we just have to tear that wall down!"

"Hell yeah!" Rika agreed. "I'll get Emiya to make me a sledgehammer!"

She mimed swinging one and nearly whacked her brother upside the head in the process.

"Watch it!"

"It won't be that easy," Arash said grimly, dropping cold water on her enthusiasm.

"We don't have much in the way of anti-fortress weapons," Aífe agreed. "Without that, breaking through and pushing into their capital will be a challenge at best, impossible at worst." She tapped one finger against her thigh thoughtfully. "Ochd Deug Odin might be enough to punch a hole, but if that wall is too high a rank, then even without the Pax Romana rank down, it might not be a very big one."

"Would Balmung be enough?" Mash wondered.

"It wouldn't be useless," Arash allowed, "but it's still an Anti-Army Noble Phantasm. It wasn't designed for punching holes in fortifications."

What we could really use right then was King Arthur. Excalibur, more specifically. Even diminished by Pax Romana, the idea of this wall standing up to that much concentrated power… I couldn't say for sure, but it seemed impossible. Without the twins' both using a Command Spell, Mash's Lord Chaldeas would have crumbled, after all.

"Knock-knock," Emiya's voice suddenly interrupted.

Nero turned about in her seat. "Who's there? This is a very important meeting!"

"Lunch," Emiya drawled.

"FOOD!" Rika exclaimed, leaping out of her seat.

"Food?" Nero crossed her arms, frowning thoughtfully. "Mm, I'm not quite sure this is the time, right —"

And then her stomach growled, as though to tell her, no, this was exactly the time, and her cheeks bloomed pink.

"A…Ahem!" Nero said. "Y-yes, actually! I could go for a meal right now!"

"Oh my gosh, you have no idea what you're in for!" Rika gushed. "This guy is a god of cooking, I swear!"

"We'll break for lunch, then," I decided, "and pick this up afterwards."

A round of agreements answered me. It seemed that no one wanted to miss a meal that had been cooked by Emiya.

"…Could someone let me in, then?" Emiya asked. "My arms are full."

Nero gestured, and her two bodyguards pulled the tent flaps back to let in Emiya, whose arms were laden with a pair of large, plastic trays carrying a veritable mountain of food. The instant the smell hit my nostrils, my own stomach let out a gurgle.

"I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with traditional Mediterranean dishes, so I made do with what I had," he said as he set them down on the table. "I hope you enjoy it anyway."

Each tray had five plates and enough silverware for each of us. A fully cooked meal, still steaming, occupied five of the plates, and what looked like communal side dishes filled the rest. Two long, freshly baked loaves of bread sat off to the side.

He'd really gone out of his way with this one.

"I managed to put together the ingredients for bread," he told us as he gently nudged one plate towards each of us. "But I'd suggest waiting to eat that for last. I'm told that it goes best when you use it to sop up the leftover sauce."

With a smile, he clapped his hands together. "Bon appetit!"

"That's French!" Rika complained, but she was already reaching for her silverware as she said it so that she could cut up the delicious looking slab of…I think it was fish, but it had been prepared so thoroughly with the rest of the dish that I wasn't sure.

I grabbed my own set of silverware, and at a much more sedate pace, I started in on my own meal. Flavor exploded on my tongue at the first bite, and no, I didn't let out a pleased little groan, and I was sticking to that.

Nero took an extra minute to get started, watching us surreptitiously, and it occurred to me that she might not have any idea how to actually use the silverware Emiya had provided for us. She had actually originally picked up the spoon, and then stopped when she realized she was the only one.

"Emiya, I have no idea how I got by before you showed up!" Rika moaned.

"I aim to please," Emiya said, amused.

Tentatively, Nero picked up her fork and her knife and used the former to spear her meal and the latter to cut, and then she lifted her bite up to her mouth, popped it in — and her face exploded with surprised delight.

"Mm-mm! This is the food of the gods!" she declared, and then she sunk in with gusto. "Surely this must be ambrosia! The gods themselves would be jealous!"

Bite after bite disappeared into her mouth, and soon, she was eating so quickly that it was like she was competing with Rika to see who could demolish their meal fastest. It was like neither of them realized that they could enjoy it longer if they ate it slower.

No longer hesitant, she reached for one of the skewers sitting on the communal side dish and lifted it off the plate. Three round balls, caramelized and sticky with some kind of glazing, were stabbed through upon it.

"And what confectionary masterpiece is this?"

"Dango," Emiya answered. "I had to adjust the recipe to account for what I had on hand, but that should just make it more to your liking than not."

"I have no idea what that is, but it sounds delicious!" Nero said happily.

Without a care, she stopped eating what was on her plate long enough to angle one of the balls past her lips, and then she ripped it off the skewer like a lioness tearing at a gazelle. She bit down — and then she stopped.

Her eyes went wide. Her fork fell from her fingers and clattered to her plate. A high pitched, nasally groan squealed out of her nostrils.

"It's delicious! It's so delicious! I've never had anything so incredible in all my life!"

One fist slammed down onto the table. The other hand shot up into the air, pointing towards the ceiling.

"That's it!" she proclaimed. "From this day forward, you shall be the Emperor's personal chef! Mm-mm! So declares Emperor Nero!"

"Hey!" Rika, who'd been reached for one of the loaves of bread, leapt to her feet, brandishing the long, thin loaf like a sword. "That's my house-husband you're trying to poach, there!"

Off to the side, Emiya sighed. "So much for her forgetting about that part."

Nero leapt to her feet, too. "I am Emperor! My word is law!"

Rike lifted her other hand, showing off the stark red marks there. "And I hold his Command Spells!"

Nero snatched up the other loaf and pointed it at Rika. "It is to be a duel, then! The winner keeps my personal chef!"

"He's not your personal chef yet!"

"He is, because I have no intention of losing! Mm-mm!"

And amidst all of this, Ritsuka continued eating like nothing was wrong. I envied his serenity.