Chapter XXXIII: Performance Review

The twins laid upon the stage, completely and utterly vulnerable. If I wanted to go the extra mile, I would have pulled in my swarm and had the venomous yellow Joro spiders wrap them up in webbing while the enormous Huntsmans skittered about their bodies. It would certainly have driven my point home.

But it was cruelty bordering on pointlessness, and I thought that this was far enough to get the lesson across. No need to heap more trauma on them now.

I did let them stew a little bit, however, as I made my way sedately through the hallways and down the stairs that led to the antechamber beneath the box seats that sat to either side of the stage. Their eyes snapped to me the instant the door opened, as much as they were able to with everything below the neck paralyzed.

That particular little bit had been… Well, I felt a little bad about it, but in lieu of having an actual spell that could immobilize them, I hadn't had much choice except to program in a "venom" that did it for me. I made sure, however, that neither of them saw the giant hornets that delivered the sting, if only to avoid stepping on any traumas or cultural fears they might have grown up with in Tokyo.

"If I was a proper Caster," I told them as I stepped closer. My footsteps were utterly silent, cushioned by my costume, "I could use an opportunity like this to take any information I wanted out of your heads. Some Casters might have some kind of telepathy power that would let them do it directly, and some would just hypnotize you into spilling whatever secrets they wanted. If they didn't have a use for you afterwards, they'd probably just kill you. Some of them, however, might force you to use your Command Spells to order your Servants to obey them."

That part especially, I needed to have them understand. Casters tended to be less physical, less capable of direct combat, and if they had the means, I couldn't imagine one of them wouldn't brainwash one of us Masters into working for them, bringing our Servants along for the ride.

It would absolutely break Mash's heart to have to fight against one of the twins, brainwashed or not.

"Fortunately, I didn't think sodium pentathol or some other truth serum would be quite the same as being hypnotized, so I didn't load any of my bugs with them. I wasn't sure whether or not it would affect your memories either, and it would defeat the point if you didn't remember any of this when it was over."

When I reached him, I crouched down next to Ritsuka and extended my arm; from one of the folds of my costume, an itsy bitsy house spider crawled down, over my hand, and onto the floor. It made its way across the wooden planks adroitly and climbed up Ritsuka's hand, just far enough to sit on the fleshy part between his thumb and index finger, and then it sank its tiny fangs into his skin.

Ritsuka gasped, but by the time my "antidote" had made it far enough into his system to counteract the paralytic, that little house spider had already moved on and made its way over to Rika. She kept her eyes on it, so to spare her the anxiety, I had it cross out of her line of sight and go for the other hand instead. It went for the same place it had on Ritsuka and bit her, too.

The instant Rika could move again, she scrambled to her feet and as far away from my little spider as she could. "Eek!"

Ritsuka, likewise, stumbled to his feet and cautiously stepped away, eyeing it like it was some terrible, horrible beast out to kill him. A part of me wanted to roll my eyes at how melodramatic they were being.

My little house spider ignored them both and scurried back towards me, then back up my hand, up my arm, and into the little hiding place he'd come out of. Once he was there, I stood back up.

"Follow me, you two."

I turned towards the door I'd come out of, intent on leading them to my hiding spot, but Ritsuka behind me brought me up short. "Um, Senpai?"

I looked back at him and the uncertain expression on his face. "Yes?"

"Do you think you could…" He gestured vaguely at his head. "You know?"

My brow furrowed beneath my mask. What was he… Oh. Yeah, I guess that might be a bit unnerving, wasn't it? Well, the lesson wasn't quite over yet, but the part I needed it for was, so it had served its purpose.

"Right."

My fingers found the seam where the bottom of my mask rolled down over the neck of the bodysuit, and I peeled it up and over my head, shaking my hair and combing my fingers through it to get it back into place. Once I'd tucked the mask into my belt, I found my glasses in the compartment where I'd put them for safekeeping and slipped them back on, sliding them that last little bit up the bridge of my nose with one finger.

Ritsuka looked marginally less tense than before, so I took that as confirmation that taking off the creepy mask was what he had been asking me to do.

"Let's go," I said. "Come with me."

This time, when I turned and started walking, the twins fell into step behind me, silent but for the clop of their shoes on the wooden stage.

"Oh my god," I heard Rika whisper. "I need a shower. All the showers. All of them. That was so gross."

"Me, too," Ritsuka replied just as quietly.

I led them backstage, and then to the hidden staircase behind the seats that overlooked the back of the stage. At some point, the twins turned on the flashlight function on their communicators, and I realized to my chagrin that I'd fallen into the habit of navigating entirely with my bugs again instead of using my more mundane senses. It was only going to make things harder on me when we left the simulator again and I was limited only to what I could sense as an ordinary human.

We went down the stairs and into a corridor, and then I took them to the enormous basement, an absolutely huge room with an entire ceiling made of lights and a hard, concrete floor and walls. Row upon row of boxes containing all sorts of supplies and replacement materials were stacked on those barebones metal storage racks, the kind made of simple l-shapes with evenly spaced holes going up the limbs and hollow planks forming shelves so that they could be adjusted to accommodate any size needs. There was a chill here that wasn't there upstairs, like the rest of the building was heated and this place was left cool.

"Over here," I told them.

Bobbing and weaving through the maze of shelving units, I led them through the labyrinth and towards the very back of the room. On the way, we passed spare lightbulbs, spare cutlery, spare tables (still packaged in plain cardboard boxes), spare chairs (in need of assembly), spare pots and pans, spare nametag stickers, and an assortment of other goods and products a civic center might need for its guests. Sheets of paper, bedsheets, pillowcases, and office supplies galore.

At the very back of the room, sequestered between two shelving units, there sat an ordinary chair behind an ordinary desk. When we reached it, I turned back to face them and sat down on the desk, folding my legs and leaning back on my arms.

"The entire time you were upstairs," I informed them, "I was down here."

The twins' eyebrows shot towards their hairlines, and they gaped at me, looking around in astonishment.

"What?" Ritsuka croaked out.

"I disabled the traps down here before I came back up, don't worry," I said, although this didn't exactly seem to make them feel any better. "But yes. I didn't move from this spot until the two of you committed to taking on my decoy on the stage. Until then, I stayed down here and engaged from afar."

"You're shitting me," Rika said bluntly. "The entire time, you were sitting down here and terrorizing us with bugs from afar, like —"

"A proper Caster," Ritsuka concluded, sounding like he'd come to some kind of important realization.

I nodded.

"I won't tell you that Casters never get overconfident and reveal themselves when they shouldn't, nor that all of them do the smartest, cleverest, most underhanded thing every time. But the smartest and cleverest of them will do what I did. They'll misdirect, they'll deceive, they'll send you running around in circles, walking into trap after trap after trap. You might never meet them face to face, and when you do, it's because they're either that desperate or they're that confident they've already won."

There was a quote somewhere, although I couldn't remember where, about hoping that the guy on the other end of the gun was an evil man, because evil men loved to monologue and delay, putting off the final moment. It wasn't entirely right, because when grudges were involved, people tended to want to air their grievances before the kill. Most people had just enough evil in them to spit on an enemy they hated.

But magic was an intellectual pursuit, to my understanding, at least generally. Most mages were scholars first and fighters second. They were the type to enjoy lording victory over their opponents, like Thinkers did, bragging about how much smarter and cleverer they were. I wasn't so blind to Lisa's faults that I hadn't seen that in her, too.

Of course, cutting words were the only weapons a Thinker like her had, so I couldn't blame her too much for leaning on her greatest strength a little too hard sometimes.

"I was also incredibly obvious about which direction I wanted you to go," I went on. "Most Casters won't be. Some will, if they have a way of forcing you to go that way like I did, but most won't. If they want you to fall into a particular trap at all, they're more likely to make it seem safer than your other options, hoping you won't think about why. You won't realize you've walked right into their hands until it's already too late to do anything about it."

I thought of Jack Slash, just then, although the comparison wasn't quite as one-to-one as I would have liked for an example. Jack's traps had tended more towards the verbal than the physical, manipulating people with honeyed words and deceptions, as opposed to a Caster using spells and magic.

The idea was shelved and put away for later. "So, for the purposes of the exercise, I didn't give you any choice except to come after me. I hope I got some of my point across about why facing a Caster in their place of power is a bad idea. Having said that, I was a bit impressed that you knew where to go and didn't waste any time getting here. Why the civic center?"

They stared at me dumbly for a second before they realized it wasn't a rhetorical question.

"You said you were going to pretend to be a Caster Servant," Ritsuka answered. "I… We thought that the best place for a Caster Servant to settle down and defend herself would be at one of the Ley Line Terminals, where there's supposed to be lots of magical energy."

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"Don't be modest, Onii-chan," said Rika, although it lacked some of her usual cheer. "That was all you."

Ritsuka grimaced but didn't correct her. "There's only two of them on this side of the city. The church…seemed like a better idea, but too far away to get there and start setting up traps in just half an hour."

I nodded, seeing how his thought process must have gone.

"So you decided to look here first, because it was closer and easier to get to," I concluded. "Good. I was hoping you two would remember the Ley Line Terminals and realize that was where I was going."

They had done better than I was expecting, actually. We hadn't exactly sat down and given them lessons about why a proper Caster who knew actual magic would choose to fortify atop a Ley Line Terminal when they had the chance, but the logic behind it wasn't that hard to grasp and should be fairly obvious when you gave it much thought. It wasn't that I thought the twins were stupid, just that they didn't have the experience that should make that sort of thinking more common.

It looked like they'd been paying closer and better attention than I'd originally given them credit for, though.

"Not all Casters will automatically choose the Ley Line Terminal," I warned them. "Since it's the most obvious spot, it's also the spot most likely for enemies to look for a Caster at, and sometimes, the location is just too inconvenient to try fortifying, even for really talented Casters. Here in Fuyuki, however, they're all very conveniently located in easily defended positions, so expecting a Caster to choose one of them is probably the correct idea."

I slid off the table and stood.

"When we do something like this again, I'll have to try and come up with a harder, less obvious spot, so that we can get you used to thinking about the best places to hide in and the easiest places to defend."

"We're going to do this again?" Rika squawked.

"Not exactly this," I allowed. "This time, I was trying to prove a point. You weren't supposed to beat me, because you're not supposed to fight a Caster in her workshop and definitely not without Servants."

The twins looked affronted. Like they were upset that I'd stacked the deck so hard against them, when stacking the deck was part of what I'd been trying to drive home.

"But you two do need to learn what it's like to fight in a city," I continued. "In alleyways and buildings, on streets. Places where there isn't as much room to maneuver and you have to think more about the space around you. We still have six more Singularities to go, and we won't be fighting in open fields, parks, or forests the entire time."

Rika opened her mouth to say something.

"Like at La Charité," her brother mumbled solemnly.

Rika's mouth slowly closed.

"Or the city where you found Georgios," I added.

"Périgueux," said Ritsuka. I was a little ashamed that I was surprised he'd remembered its name.

"What would you have done if Jeanne Alter had come at you on the ground instead of riding Fafnir? You would have had to think more about what was around you and where you were, how you were going to fight her. In a way, coming after you with Fafnir made things easier on you. It made it so that the only thing you had to think about was getting as far away from her as you could as quickly as you could."

"It just cost us Marie," Ritsuka said bitterly.

I thought of Brian, of Alec, who had been lost in the fighting, of Revel, one of the many I'd sacrificed during Gold Morning just to stave off the end for a little bit longer so I could find a way to win. I thought of Lisa and Rachel and Aisha, who I had left behind to pursue that chance, however slim, of stopping the end of the world. I hadn't had the chance to meet Marie Antoinette, not when she was alive (of course) and not as the Servant who had made fast friends with these two, but I sympathized with his pain.

My regrets were legion, and although I'd gone through with it in the moment, the people I'd sacrificed — both in terms of friendships lost and in the more literal, final sense — hadn't felt as justified at the end.

"Sometimes," I said quietly, "those are unavoidable, too."

The twins both looked away with miserable expressions on their faces. A part of me wished I could comfort them, but the cold, hard truth remained that Marie Antoinette and Mozart might have been the first Servants we lost, but they probably weren't going to be the last.

I wasn't under any illusions that the day would never come that Arash had to use his Noble Phantasm.

"We'll worry about covering that another time," was my pathetic attempt to move the atmosphere back to something a little less heavy. "For now, it should be close enough to dinner time that we need to get out of here and make sure Emiya has actually gone to prepare it."

As pathetic as it might have been, it was still apparently enough to perk them up a little, so I turned to my wrist, lifted the "communicator" that served as my control panel, and deftly set about ending the simulation.

It never stopped being a little eerie when it did. The way the entire world froze, like time had stopped except for me, and then slowly became blurrier and blurrier until it was nothing more than big blobs of pixels, before it finally cut to black for just long enough to send a shiver down my spine. Even if the whole process never took more than a couple of seconds, it felt entirely too long.

The scant moments of helplessness when I "woke up" in the simulator room weren't better. They reminded me of being at Bonesaw's mercy, how I'd been unable to do anything, even use my bugs, as she went through the list of things she wanted to do to me.

But there was nothing for me to do except ride it out and wait as the helmet that made the simulator work lifted off my head. Wait for the special device that connected to my central nervous system to disconnect so I could feel my arms and legs again, move them about.

A sigh hissed out of my mouth, and I levered myself up, carding a hand through my hair.

And then someone decided to start clapping.

Startled, I looked over to the console where the Servants had been watching us, and there, standing at the forefront with a bright smile —

"Bravo! Bravissimo!"

— was Da Vinci.

"Da Vinci-chan was watching us the whole time?" Rika sputtered.

"My dear Rika, I've watched every single one of your practice sessions!" Da Vinci told her cheerfully. Rika let out an agonized groan. "Normally, I watch them while I'm taking a short break from whatever project I might be in the middle of, but for this particular session, I simply had to come and watch it in person!"

Ritsuka grimaced. "You watched Senpai beat us that badly."

"I-it wasn't that bad!" Mash rushed to reassure him. "Really, you did very well under the circumstances, Senpai!"

"It was a matter of professional curiosity, if you will," said Da Vinci, still smiling. "After all, it's true that I am what Taylor would call the only proper Caster Servant currently in Chaldea. I simply couldn't wait until later to see how well she captured the experience of how one would fight."

"Oh?" I arched an eyebrow. "What's the verdict, then?"

"I would think my reaction when you came out of the simulator captured my opinion well enough," Da Vinci replied sardonically. "But if you want me to say it directly, then yes, you captured the experience quite well, Taylor."

"A little too well," Bradamante muttered.

"I never faced a mage in my life, so I can't make any informed judgment either way," Siegfried added. "For what it's worth, I thought it was well done."

"As a Caster myself, I do know," said Da Vinci, taking control of the conversation again. "There were some things that weren't quite right, owing to your own limitations in the field of magecraft, but you got the overall experience down pat. Frankly, Taylor, I feel a little embarrassed to admit that you're actually a little sneakier about trapping your territory than I am."

So she'd seen some of the stuff I'd been planning that the twins had managed to avoid through sheer dumb luck. I guess that was what you had to expect from a genius of her caliber.

"High praise, coming from you," Arash noted. "You might be long after my time, but the name Leonardo da Vinci still carries a great deal of weight in the Throne, even if your legend isn't particularly glamorous or mighty."

It did? I looked at Da Vinci, but she gave no indication that the praise or the comment affected her one way or the other.

"It's a matter of personality and ways of thinking." Da Vinci brushed it off. "After all, for someone who was a brilliant star from the beginning, learning to leverage even the tiniest and most underwhelming aspects of one's abilities is something often overlooked. For someone who only had the one thing, learning to exploit every aspect of it is the difference between excellence and mediocrity. Sometimes, it's the difference between life and death."

"I'm sure Emiya would appreciate the compliment," said Arash with a grin.

"It's too bad he's not here to receive it," Bradamante agreed. "It's always good to hear one's hard work praised!"

As long as you don't let it get to your head, I thought wryly.

"Say," said Rika, "where is Emiya?"

"Emiya went to prepare dinner, I do believe."

I fought down a smirk. Had he heard my comment about it and decided that discretion was the better part of valor?

Rika breathed a sigh of relief. "At least he wasn't here to see the whole thing."

"Oh, he was," said Arash, laughing. "He stayed until you two were captured, but he left before he could hear the whole lecture you got afterwards."

"Maybe he heard what Miss Taylor said and decided he needed to go make sure dinner was ready on time," Mash suggested.

"Forget Senpai," Rika said dryly. "If dinner was late tonight because he stayed back to watch us get our asses kicked, I'd put him on kitchen duty until further notice."

"But Senpai, Emiya is already on kitchen duty, isn't he?" Mash pointed out.

"Exactly!"

I shook my head. We were already drifting away from the whole point of the exercise.

"Ritsuka, Rika."

The two of them nearly snapped to attention, such was their reaction to my tone. I wasn't sure what it said — about them, about me, or about our relationship — that they were acting that way in response to a little bit of sternness.

"You can't really get physically tired in the simulator since it's not really happening, but it can still take a toll on you mentally. Why don't the two of you go relax before dinner?"

Rika saluted me, grinning. "Yes, ma'am!"

Ritsuka shook his head. "Thanks, Senpai. We'll go do that."

"Take Mash with you, too."

"B-but I wasn't doing anything in the simulator today!" said Mash.

"You're their Servant, aren't you?" Da Vinci asked, perhaps having caught onto my intentions. "You don't need to follow them everywhere, but their well-being is still your top priority."

Mash straightened, standing in the way I'd come to associate with the determination she carried in her Servant form. "Right!"

"At ease, Mash," said Ritsuka, smiling. "We're just going down the hall, not into the next Singularity."

Mash ducked her head, twin spots of pink dusting her cheeks. "Right…"

The three of them left together, and the rest of us watched them go. Bradamante's head swiveled as she looked back and forth between them and me, and the moment she seemed to realize what was going on was almost like the stereotypical moment in a cartoon where a lightbulb turned on above the character's head.

"Hey!" She took off after the twins and Mash. "Wait for me, guys!"

Arash shook his head. "Well, it's not like I can't take a hint. I'll go make sure they don't get into trouble, Master."

He elbowed Siegfried in the side, and Siegfried blinked. "Ah. Yes, I suppose I will, as well."

They left, too, and then it was just Da Vinci and me. She gave me a sardonic smile.

"I'm going to hazard a guess that you don't want tips for your next session with the twins, do you?" she asked sardonically.

"No," I agreed. "I wanted to ask… Has there been any progress with the Director? With Marie?"

Da Vinci sighed, a deep, heavy thing with weight.

"You already know that we don't have the biological materials necessary to build her a new body."

"I'm aware," I said sharply. "But the rest of it?"

"I do have quite a bit more on my plate than just the Director's health, you know." Like I wasn't already aware of that. I might not have known exactly how much Da Vinci was responsible for around the facility, but I wasn't ignorant of the fact that she was one of the only things keeping this whole place running at all, let alone so smoothly. "And as much as I might make it seem easy, even someone of my talent can't magic up a solution to such a delicate problem instantly."

"I know," I said, and I bit down on any bitterness and frustration. "But she's already been on ice for a month. That's a month she's not going to get back. How much longer is she going to have to wait?"

Da Vinci sighed again and was silent for a moment. The index finger of that mechanical glove she wore — and it was a glove or a gauntlet of some kind, because I'd seen her without it — tapped against her staff like the ticking of a clock. I had to metaphorically bite my tongue to keep my impatience in check, although it got a lot closer to literal than I was proud to admit.

"I think I'll have the systems prepared before your Rayshift into Rome. The 'tissue printers,' that is, for lack of a better term," she said at last. "While you're in Rome, we should be able to gather the necessary materials for me to begin constructing a new body for Director Animusphere. After that… It will take me about a week to construct the body itself. Depending on how quickly we can gather the necessary materials, she could be back and shouting at us all in about a month."

I grimaced. "Another month?"

"My original estimate was three, if you'll remember," Da Vinci said. "By that measure, we're actually quite a bit ahead of schedule."

"That doesn't mean it's fast enough."

But it sounded petulant even to my ears.

She smiled at me. "I'm not unsympathetic, Taylor, not at all. Although it may be a little more selfish of me, I would like for the Director to make her return as swiftly as possible, too, so that Romani no longer has to shoulder command for this little endeavor."

Was it wrong to admit that was one of the reasons I wanted her back, too? Romani wasn't a bumbling fool, but he really didn't have the temperament to run Chaldea, even if he was trying his absolute best — and destroying himself in the process.

But more than that, Marie was someone I cared about. Knowing that she was held captive in the FATE system pushed many of the same buttons as Dinah's captivity had, and that was mixed up with the underlying thread of a similar terror and helplessness to what I'd felt seeing Brian splayed open by Bonesaw.

It wasn't the same, but I felt just as impotent and useless as I had then.

"But technology can't be built faster simply by wishing it were so," Da Vinci went on. "Nor can resources be gathered more quickly or work be done more quickly. I know I don't need to tell you this, Taylor, but there are some things that just can't be helped. As agonizing as it is to wait, we don't have any other choice."

I sighed and carded a hand through my hair. "I know."

That didn't make the waiting any easier.

Da Vinci smiled warmly at me. "I'll say it as many times as you need me to: we will get Director Marie Animusphere back. I promise you, I won't give up on her, no matter what setbacks try to get in our way. A genius never lets a little thing like obstacles stop her, no matter how insurmountable they might seem!"

And she meant every word of it. It was rare that I got to see it, but right then and there, I felt like I was looking not at the eccentric Servant who flitted about Chaldea tinkering on whatever caught her fancy, but the unparalleled genius celebrated for his vast intellect and the far-sighted vision of the future that had let him blaze a path through history. I was looking at Leonardo da Vinci, the legendary Renaissance Man, Uomo Universale.

"I'm going to hold you to that, Da Vinci."

The grin she gave me was fierce and full of teeth. "Frankly, Taylor, I would be disappointed if you didn't."