Chapter XXXI: Make a Master Out of You
The black ball of a Gandr shot fizzed past my head as I ducked, and I returned fire with a Gandr of my own. Rika yelped and took the stinging attack on her shoulder as she scrambled to dodge and failed.
"Gandr!" Ritsuka shouted as he fired a retaliatory shot to avenge his sister, but I countered with a burst from the ether cannon hidden in Muninn's throat and canceled out his attack.
"Keep moving!" I called out to them, and I punctuated my words with a pair of sizzling shots from Huginn that nipped at the twins' toes, forcing them back into motion.
"Gandr!"
I ducked behind a tree and let the spell splash harmlessly against the bark, and then moved again, squeezing off two more shots with my own Gandr as Huginn and Muninn let off one each of their own. The twins both yelped again when my attacks landed, jerking and stumbling backwards like they'd been burned.
They hadn't been, of course. This was just a simulator. Virtual reality. The settings had been adjusted to let us feel pain — hence the shock whenever one of my shots landed — but no actual damage was being done, except to their pride.
"Keep moving!" I called out again. The twins scrambled to follow my order, and finally, after staying out in the open had earned them hits as punishment, they made to find cover in the foliage of the forest where our "battle" was taking place.
I took my own advice and found cover again, using the break in the line of sight to change direction and shake their attention.
There was one definite plus side to having to support Servants and supply them with magical energy: it made you work out your Magic Circuits. Cúchulainn back in Fuyuki had already pushed me past where I had spent two years hovering, but being a constant tap for a pair of hungry spirits had forced me to widen the channels even further, and that had the unintended benefit of increasing my shot limit.
Huginn and Muninn cawed as they flitted about among the branches and leaves above, their inhumanly sharp eyes on the lookout for a pair of twins who should be finding good cover to hide behind. Through their eyes, I spotted my targets, and Muninn opened his beak again to let off another shot from his ether cannon.
Rika grunted as she hid behind her chosen tree, letting Munnin's shot go wide, and then she came back out to squeeze out a shot from her own Gandr. Huginn was already there and countering her, and rather than press the fight, my two puppets retreated into the cover of the leaves, getting out of the line of fire.
But an increase in the amount of stress I could comfortably put on my circuits consecutively did not suddenly make me a first class mage with high quality magic circuits and an oil tanker's worth of magical energy. Even with Huginn and Muninn there to provide me backup, there was only so much I could do in quick succession before my circuits started "overheating."
Hence our game.
The rules were simple: I wouldn't use my bugs directly or overtly, and that meant no swarming them with a biblical plague or trying to trick them with bug clones, because it would defeat the purpose of training them to fight, and I wouldn't lay traps. They won if they managed to hit me twice — once each was how I intended that to go, but I'd deliberately left that open so that it just had to be twice period — and Huginn and Muninn would count as "disabled" after one hit. Anyone who ran out of magical energy, which was determined by the official measurements of our capacity in Chaldea's records, automatically lost.
There was a glaring, obvious hole in those rules. The only way for the twins to lose was to run out of energy before they got two solid hits on me, another deliberate choice on my part. It might have been fairer if the loss factors were the same for both sides, but fairness was one of the first things I'd started to drill out of them. Fair was for video games and fairy tales. I was teaching them how to survive.
As Huginn and Muninn found hiding spaces in the foliage, I had them start to crow to cover the rustle of the fake underbrush when I moved back out of cover. It had the added benefit of psychological warfare, because a pair of cawing ravens was an unnerving soundtrack to a battlefield.
I did miss my costume, though. Not only would the dark colors have made it easier to blend into the shadows, the design itself had its own intimidation factor, and while I didn't want to scare the twins away, learning to deal with psychological stressors was one of the things they would have to do if they wanted to make it out of this Grand Order intact. I just hadn't been able to justify giving it to myself when I didn't have the real thing anymore. That might not have been anywhere in the rules, but it went against the spirit of the limits I was trying to work within.
My path swung around towards Rika's last position. The simulated fly that clung to the back of her shirt had moved, but not particularly far.
They'd improved, at least. The first time we did one of these war games with my puppets, they'd tried to shoot Huginn and Muninn in the trees, thinking that my puppets could be startled out of hiding by near misses the way ordinary birds would have been, and all they'd managed to accomplish was to exhaust themselves. They hadn't tried that trick since.
I took the roundabout way towards Rika and set a group of wasps in the opposite direction buzzing. Rika swiveled around at the noise, but unlike our first go around, she didn't take the bait. Instead, she ignored my distraction and turned away completely to regroup with her brother, a path that inconveniently took her perpendicular to mine.
They were fast learners.
Adjusting my course to intersect with hers, I had Huginn and Muninn take off again, still cawing as they flew up above the treetops instead of swooping down into the fray. It had the added benefit of giving me a literal bird's eye view of the battlefield, although that didn't count for much when the battlefield was the Ardenne Forest in the flush of summertime. It was a little easier when I had a bug on Rika and Ritsuka, so I knew what direction to aim my ravens' sharp eyes, but the thick foliage wasn't conducive to a clear view.
But it helped give me an even better idea of what the terrain looked like, so I adjusted Huginn and Muninn's flight paths to send them further off to the side, still cawing. In real time, I got to watch Rika and Ritsuka both turn away from them — directly towards the river Meuse.
Theoretically, we could have been traveling through this exact stretch of forest in exactly these sorts of conditions in the Orléans Singularity, because this stretch of the Ardenne Forest was still within the borders of France and there were a couple of towns and villages along the river. We just had never gone this far east while we were in that Singularity, in no small part because we'd never had a reason to, so the twins didn't have any idea what I was pushing them towards.
That was technically their first mistake. I'd told them yesterday that we were going to be heading to the French section of the Ardenne, but they hadn't done the research to get a better handle on the terrain beforehand.
Maybe they'd just thought Da Vinci was too busy to bother her for a map. I could understand that, but Da Vinci was a resource that they could have taken advantage of and they didn't.
Rika and Ritsuka eventually met up and matched pace with each other, still heading towards the river. They'd probably hear it before they saw it, the trees were so thick, but I was chasing them towards it, and they didn't seem to realize that yet.
Inevitably, they reached the riverside and had to come to a stop, and I myself slowed down so I could creep up on them unheard and eavesdrop a little to see if they came up with any good plans. Deliberately, I kept Huginn and Muninn farther back to trick the twins into thinking I wasn't as close as I was.
"Shit," said Rika, panting for breath. "Senpai's really going hard, this time. Do you think we lost her?"
"Not a chance," said Ritsuka. "I bet she knows exactly where we are."
"What do we do?"
Ritsuka shook his head. "We just have to hit her twice."
"I dunno if you noticed this, Onii-chan, but Senpai's a certified badass. We haven't even hit her once."
"Ambush?" Ritsuka suggested.
This time, Rika was the one to shake her head. "You just said Senpai knows exactly where we are, didn't you? Think we can out terminate the terminator?"
"If we time it right…"
"Or we could just give up."
I almost broke cover to scold Rika for that one, but I wanted to see what Ritsuka would say in response. A moment of silence passed as they regarded each other, and then they continued like the suggestion had never been made.
"Hey, Gandr's not the only spell loaded into these mystic codes, right?"
Finally, I thought. I'd been waiting for them to realize that ever since we started these sessions. If they hadn't come to that on their own, I had planned to include it as part of the lecture after this one.
"If we use the two of these together… Think we can make it work?"
"I don't have any better ideas. What've we got to lose?"
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"The match," I said as I came out of my hiding place.
The twins whirled around to face me, but my arm was already coming up and a Gandr was on my fingertips before they could even do anything. Showing that they had indeed been learning from these sessions, they both threw themselves out of the way, but there was nowhere left for them to go with their backs to the river.
I swung my arm around and took aim at Rika.
"Emergency evasion!" Ritsuka shouted right as I intoned my simple, "Gandr."
And space seemed to shift a little as my spell curve harmlessly around Rika's body to splash ineffectually against the grass.
I turned my aim again at Ritsuka, funneling magical energy into my spell, and once more, before I could fire it off, there was a panicked, hurried shout, this time from Rika.
"Emergency evasion! Momentary reinforcement!"
"Gandr."
My spell curved around Ritsuka's body as he suddenly burst into motion, far, far faster than an ordinary human had any right to be. It wouldn't have even been enough for a Mover 2 rating, but it was just superhuman enough that there was no time for me to get out of the way.
Before I knew it, he threw his arms around me to pin me in place.
"Rika!"
"Gandr!"
Unfortunately for Ritsuka, I knew a thing or two about grappling, and I stepped forward with one foot, hooking my ankle behind his and yanking him off balance. At the same time, I took hold of his belt with my hands and twisted in the same direction. It wasn't textbook and it wasn't perfect, but it was exactly the sort of thing I'd learned first with Brian and then in the Wards.
Rika's Gandr crackled and sizzled against Ritsuka's back.
Ritsuka gasped, and as his grip loosened in his surprise, I finished the throw and dropped him to the ground.
"I didn't say it was against the rules, so nice effort," I said. "But we're not ready to start on hand to hand drills, because the last thing you want to do is get into melee with a Servant. We'll cover that later."
Ritsuka groaned on the ground. I lifted my hand up, took aim, and fired another shot. "Gandr."
Rika shrieked and scrambled to her feet, not quite fast enough to completely avoid the black ball that nipped at her ankles. She didn't stand straight, she hunched over warily, staring back at me unblinkingly.
I gave her a moment to think up a plan, a handful of tense seconds where her eyes darted all over the place, trying to find a way out. Huginn and Muninn cawed ominously from overhead.
And then Rika went and did something unexpected: she dove into the river.
"Rika!" her brother shouted. He hesitated a moment, but another shot from Muninn made up his mind. "Shit!"
He scrambled to his feet and dove in after her.
"Well," I said to myself as I watched them struggle against the current to reach the other side. "I guess it's only stupid if it doesn't work."
It was dangerous against the wrong kind of enemy — for instance, if I was so inclined, I could have used my prosthetic's phantom limb to drag them under the surface and drown them both — but as an escape plan, sometimes the extreme option was the only one that kept you alive. Voice of experience on that one.
I gave them time to pull themselves up off of the other bank, waiting to make sure they made it safely to the other side, and then I backed away to give myself a running start, broke out into a sprint, and cycled magical energy through my own mystic code.
Momentary reinforcement!
My legs suddenly doubled, tripled in strength, easily matching and then surpassing an Olympic sprinter, and I kicked off the ground right on the edge of the near bank of the Meuse, leaping towards the opposite side. It became quickly obvious that it still wasn't enough to make it all the way across, so Huginn and Muninn swooped down and each took hold of an arm, pulling me up just that little bit extra so I could hover safely back onto land.
The utterly dumbfounded expressions on the twins' faces almost made me crack a smile.
"That's so totally not fair," Rika complained.
But I'd given them enough of a reprieve already, so my ravens fired off a pair of sizzling shots, and the twins, completely soaked, caked with mud, threw themselves out of the way. Together, like they'd practiced it, they rolled into a crouch, lifted their arms, took quick aim, and each of them fired off a Gandr shot.
"Gandr!"
Huginn and Muninn fired back, aiming into the grass at an angle behind the twins because the bugs I'd kept on them had "washed off" in the river. Shot and counter shot met midair and cancelled out with a crackle, leaving us right back where we started, only with them colder, wetter, and more tired than they had been in the beginning.
A buzzer sounded from my wrist, and I looked down to check it for a brief moment. "That's the match," I announced.
Ritsuka perked up. "It is?"
"We won?" Rika asked hopefully.
"No."
Their faces fell. Sorry to break it to you, kids.
"That last shot used up the last of your allotted energy," I told them. "That means you're both out."
"Aw, man!" Rika let out a deep, gusty sigh. "We were so close, too!"
Not as close as she thought they were, but closer than I would have liked, considering I had been getting pretty close to my own limits. Was I supposed to be proud they'd last so long, or frustrated I hadn't driven them to "exhaustion" quicker?
Well, they were still supposed to be learning from this. Beating them down without mercy kind of defeated the point.
"That's just how it is, sometimes," I said instead. "We'll go get some lunch, and then we'll go over what you did right, what you did wrong, and where you need some improvement."
Neither of them looked like they were looking forward to that, but I ignored it in favor of fiddling with the control module that was currently taking the form of the standard Chaldea communicator on my wrist. A few adjustments here, a button press there, and the entire world around us froze like a screenshot or a picture, then slowly lost cohesion and definition as the simulation shut down.
The next thing I knew, I was sitting in the simulator room with the VR headset lifting up off of my eyes as the neural connections disengaged and I regained control of my real limbs. I stood up and started stretching with a grunt, loosening up the kinks I'd gained from sitting so still in one spot, and it was about then that I noticed our audience.
"You guys were so close!" Bradamante cheered. "You almost had her! I'm sure you'll win next time!"
"Tii-chan?" Rika asked groggily as she slowly pulled herself to her feet.
My cheek twitched at the ridiculous nickname, but Bradamante didn't seem at all bothered by it.
"You two did well," Arash said with a smile. "Much better than your last session. You've been improving dramatically."
"Arash is here, too?" Ritsuka mumbled. "And Emiya and… Wait. Is that everyone?"
Indeed, it was. Siegfried, Bradamante, Arash, Mash, and Emiya, all of the Servants except for Shakespeare had gathered in front of…was that a monitor? Yes, a monitor, overlooking the main simulator, where they had all been huddled together until Bradamante said something. All that was missing was a big barrel of popcorn shared between them.
"Everyone except for that playwright," said Emiya. "He said something about training montages being too mundane to observe and holed up in his room."
"Were you…watching us?"
"Ah…"
The Servants all froze and looked at one another guiltily, like a group of children who had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
"Yes, we were," Mash was the one to admit, smiling sheepishly. "I'm sorry, Miss Taylor, Senpai. We wanted to watch your training session together."
Emiya sighed and rubbed at the back of his neck. "Bradamante wanted to make sure everything was safe and no one was getting hurt."
"It was a legitimate concern!" the one so named protested.
"There isn't much else to do around here for us, so the rest of us thought it might be interesting to see, too," Emiya went on like she hadn't spoken. "Da Vinci is the one who arranged for the monitor setup. She said it's just a stopgap measure until she can get something a little bigger in place."
"Aw man," Rika grumbled, "they all got to watch Senpai kick our asses!"
Emiya coughed into his hand, but it wasn't enough to hide his smile, not from me.
"You did so well, though!" Bradamante said encouragingly. "I thought you had her, a couple of times!"
"Senpai promised not to use her bugs on us, though," Ritsuka pointed out. "So it's not like she was taking us all that seriously."
"Ah…" Bradamante's mouth flapped, but she didn't seem to have a response prepared for that.
I held my tongue. There was a lot more to me taking the twins seriously than just being free to use my bugs however I liked, and they were in no way at all prepared for something like that. In fact, I very much doubted that they were ever going to be ready to face me on the warpath, and I hoped they never truly had to understand what that meant.
I wanted to say something like, "Things would have to have gone very wrong, first," but we were currently on a break between fixing twisted gnarls of altered space-time where items of incredible power called Grails were throwing proper history off track. Things had gone very wrong even before the sabotage that had killed off the vast majority of Chaldea's staff and most of my coworkers.
"That's what experience does for you," Arash said, but his smile took off any edge that the words might have had.
"You acquitted yourselves well, you needn't worry," Siegfried reassured them. "I'm certain my Master would say so as well."
All of the attention turned to me, and I sighed. Thanks for putting me in the spotlight, Siegfried.
But I kept that thought to myself instead of sending it his way.
"We're only a handful of sessions in," I said. "You two did fine for your skill level."
"That's not as comforting as you seem to think it is," Ritsuka mumbled. I pretended I hadn't heard him.
Yes, I was aware, I wasn't the warmest or cuddliest of teachers and I wasn't great about the whole "be encouraging" part of mentorship. It couldn't be helped, I was the best they were going to get, right now, because there really weren't any other options.
"We'll go over all of the things you did right and wrong later. Before that, I'd like to get something to eat. It's about time for lunch anyway, isn't it?"
I slid a pointed look over at Emiya, and he blinked, wide-eyed, like a deer caught in the headlights. "Ah…"
But he caught my hint easily enough.
"I'll go get right on that."
The words were hardly out of his mouth before he disappeared into thin air. Spirit form really was convenient for getting somewhere in a hurry, wasn't it? Or for getting out of an uncomfortable situation.
Bradamante let out a startled squawk. "He vanished!"
"He made a tactical retreat, more like," Arash said wryly, chuckling. He turned back towards the simulator, inspecting it. "You know, Master, this device is pretty interesting. Especially once we enlist the aid of more Servants, it might be nice to be able to use it ourselves for sparring and war games."
"That was one of its original functions, actually," I replied. "The goal was for Masters and Servants to train in live-fire exercises without anyone being in actual danger, including either the room or the building itself. Da Vinci has been working on repairing it since the sabotage, but it's less vital than a lot of the other things she's working on, so it's still not fully repaired yet."
Arash made a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat. "Yeah, I can understand that."
"Oh!" Bradamante gave a delighted gasp. "Lord Siegfried, I would love to have a match against you once the simulator is fully repaired! A chance to test my mettle against the Hero of the Nibelungs — who could claim to have had such a rare opportunity?"
"Surely as few as have had the chance to claim the same of you," Siegfried said with a friendly smile. "I would be honored to fight with you, Lady Bradamante."
"It might be a chance to get Ritsuka and Rika more used to field command, as well," Arash added. "It would be a good idea to split up into teams and have mock battles against each other for practice."
"That was one of the things I wanted for them to work on," I agreed. "We just haven't gotten there yet."
"I thought we did just fine in Orléans," Rika muttered mutinously.
"If you think 'fine' is good enough, then Director Animusphere would have told you to pack your bags right now," I told her mercilessly. "She wouldn't accept anything less than your best and I won't either."
The twins straightened as though the mere mention of Marie's name was enough to summon her specter from the FATE system to come and chew them out for their deficiencies.
"I think…none of us is there yet," said Mash quietly. "I know that I…I still need to get better. I need to get stronger. There's so much I still have to learn, both about the Heroic Spirit inside me and what it means to be a Demi-Servant. So…" Determination drew across her face. "Senpai, let's get better together!"
"Right!" said Ritsuka.
"We're with you all the way, Mash!" Rika cheered.
"Later," I stressed over their excitement. "We just got done with a match. Take a break, get some lunch, and we'll talk more afterwards, okay?"
"Screw lunch!" Rika shouted. "I'm ready to go again right now, Senpai! Give us your worst!"
A loud, low gurgle echoed through the room, and Rika blushed as red as her hair, holding one hand to her stomach.
"Okay," she said, quieter, meeker, and sheepish, "lunch first. That sounds like a good plan. We can wait to get our asses kicked again until we're doing it on a full stomach."
Ritsuka laughed awkwardly, but didn't comment on the sudden reversal. I did my best to keep my smile from showing.
They weren't what Marie would have called "proper Masters of Chaldea" yet, but I was going to see to it that they got as close as I could get them before the end of this Grand Order. Whatever it took.
I owed it to the rest of Team A and everyone else who didn't make it.