The black blade rose to encompass all four directions. Surging mana stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction.
This was pure, unvarnished power. Terrifying strength backed by a vast mana reserve.
Though, honestly speaking, the Saber class, or rather the Three Knight classes in general, were not the most optimal fit for Miss Illya. By overall practical utility...
Her most compatible classes were Berserker and Caster, followed by Assassin and Rider, with the Three Knight classes coming last. The reason was simple: the first three classes imposed no restriction on weapons, while the latter four required, to varying degrees, a weapon or mount with its own legend. And those were things class cards simply couldn't compensate for.
Which meant, theoretically, the Three Knight classes shouldn't be able to summon her at all. So the fact that she was manifesting as a Saber-class Servant was, in some sense, Miss Illya being a violation of protocol, having dressed herself in the Holy Grail system's clothing by force of a borrowed outer shell.
Not that she had any other options. By rights, she should have died in that Holy Grail War a decade ago. Through a series of calculated maneuvers, collecting all seven class cards and working backwards through Irisviel, she had only obtained a chance to play in a revival match. Betting on the hope that she would be summoned in the Fifth Holy Grail War, that she wouldn't dissolve completely before the summoning. And so, whoever used her relic to summon her would have to make do with whatever class she manifested in.
Fortunately, even if the mechanics weren't well-suited, the Saber-class stats were genuinely high. Even in the early stages, she still had quite respectable combat ability.
Put it this way: it was something like trading the highest ceiling of the Assassin class for an exceptionally high floor.
Although that floor, having consumed the Evil of This World, was probably more terrifying than the Assassin class's highest ceiling. Stat inflation from a version upgrade.
"Two of them. One is probably a Rider."
"And the other one is...?"
Hmm?
Sensing the minute mana signatures in the vicinity, Miss Illya first glanced right toward an approaching Heroic Spirit signature not yet arrived, then glanced left at the red-bodysuit man standing on a rooftop several hundred meters away, holding a black-stocking, red-sweater girl.
She hesitated briefly, then blinked the eyes beneath her black visor as though puzzling over something, and confirmed his condition a second time, then a third.
"Could it be an Assassin? But I can see him with the naked eye, and he doesn't seem to have Presence Concealment A or above. So why is my skill not working on him? A Noble Phantasm that hides one's own information? Concealing True Name-type Noble Phantasms? That shouldn't be possible. Even if True Name and Noble Phantasm are hidden, the basic stat values and class should still be readable. Did the battle just now drain too much and my skill set is malfunctioning? I saw through the Son of the Sun God Karna's stats and True Name at a glance. There's no reason I can't see through someone without even Divinity. A doppelganger-type Noble Phantasm? Is only his puppet here?"
The red man noticed Miss Illya's eyes widen, appearing greatly surprised.
Miss Illya couldn't help being bewildered in return, because her skill had failed.
As a shut-in who had been cooped up inside the Grail, our Miss Illya had naturally acquired certain unique skills, skills that provided a decisive advantage in the Holy Grail War.
One of them was called "True Name Discernment." As the name implied, it allowed her to see through any Heroic Spirit Servant's complete stats, True Name, and some of their skills under the Holy Grail War ritual.
This was partly why she had maintained an intelligence advantage against Karna and been able to seize the initiative in their fight. In her eyes, the Son of the Sun God Karna had been an open book from the moment he appeared before her. Even if she couldn't beat him, information superiority allowed her to counter-exploit.
"An existence above the super-first-rate tier? But the mana signature is so weak. A wolf in sheep's clothing? And bringing a Master to the battle, is this some new tactical approach? Confident enough in his own abilities to protect his Master in a cross-Servant clash... "
From Miss Illya's perspective, the distant red-haired man was opaque and puzzling. Everyone knew the Holy Grail War was merciless. Looking at the Fourth Holy Grail War as a reference, Magi who didn't hear confirmed news of the Assassin's death barely dared show their faces. Any Magus with half a brain was extraordinarily cautious.
Even a Clock Tower Lord like Kayneth had not been arrogant enough to believe his barriers could stop an Assassin outside his bounded field. To say nothing of Tohsaka Tokiomi and Emiya Kiritsugu, shadowy magi who were practically invisible until the decisive battle.
And so, naturally, Miss Illya found the red-clad man to be mysterious.
Brazenly bringing his Master into the combat zone of two Servants who were clearly at least super-first-rate, you'd have to be utterly without confidence to not believe he had something backing him up.
After all, this wasn't her first Holy Grail War. In her memory, even Gilgamesh hadn't dared to bring Tohsaka Tokiomi out to wander during the port battle. Servants bold enough to do this were either at the absolute peak of power and supremely self-confident, like the Conqueror King Iskandar, or they were newcomers treating the Holy Grail War like a Pokemon battle.
Thinking that Magi should only fight Magi, and Heroic Servants should only fight Heroic Servants.
True Name: Illyasviel von Einzbern.
Class: Saber.
Strength: C+.
Endurance: D.
Agility: C.
Mana: EX.
Luck: EX (Out-of-spec: F).
Noble Phantasm: A.
Class Skill: Anti-Magecraft: C. The intrinsic class skill of the Saber class. Resistance to magecraft. Possesses the ability to nullify small and medium-scale magical arrays and elemental magecraft. Even a Magus at the Formalcraft rank, or a weaker great Magus, would find it very difficult to deal effective damage to Miss Illya through magecraft alone. However, because the class is poorly compatible with her, the rank is low and cannot provide immunity to attacks from magecraft tools and magecraft constructs, such as Mystic Codes like Volumen Hydrargyrum. Additionally, due to her Evil attribute, Anti-Magecraft may experience a further reduction when facing Heroic Servant of the "Counter Guardian" type.
Personal Skills:
Reappearance of the World's Evil: A+. Oh, the Evil of This World that consumed Angra Mainyu. Oh, the snowy maiden bearing the malice of all humanity. Sparing nothing for the sake of happiness, for the sake of survival, until even yourself became a stranger. Was it worth it? You cast away your emotions, cast away your beauty, and in exchange received the power of this sin. You shall possess the authority to suppress all Heroic Spirit Servants under the Holy Grail War ritual.
Against Heroic Spirit Servants, Strength, Agility, and Endurance are unconditionally raised by two ranks. Class cards provide no additional boost; only the current highest stat value is taken. Furthermore, all skills carry the extremely potent "Anti-Heroic Spirit Servant Bane" suppression trait.
Fallen Minor Grail: B. Such a beautiful longing for a life of happiness, now fallen to this and willing to do anything to reach it. How laughable. At your moment of degradation, the Greater Grail regarded you with a sorrowful lament, though it was nothing but a lament. Your mana no longer connects directly to the Greater Grail of Fuyuki City but reconnects with the leylines instead. Though the mana replenishment rate and quality have not declined, you have lost the possibility of being gazed upon and having miracles granted. Reviled by the world, good fortune is forever beyond your reach.
Inherent Skill:
Mana Release (Evil): A. Malicious mana shall reinforce your weapons and physical body. When exerted to full effect, it can adhere to weapons for offensive strikes, infect and corrupt the surrounding environment with a rotting effect, and to a certain degree drain and consume enemy mana.
Hellsong (Das Lied der Hölle): C. A self-tracking familiar type similar to an Angel's Song, but corrupted by malicious mana. It no longer possesses the ability to self-replenish mana or scout, and takes the forms of black-red thread ravens, butterflies, black cats, spiders, and similar creatures. Compared to the agility and versatility of the White Stork Knight's familiars, these creatures prioritize individual combat capability. Woven familiars can merge, consume dead compatriots, and recover and grow rapidly. The trade-off is the risk of losing control. No more than ten can be simultaneously active at one time.
True Name Discernment: B. As an existence who has been inside the Grail itself, gaining partial access to the permissions of the Holy Grail War ritual is only reasonable. Heroic Spirit Servants are, at their core, derivatives of the magecraft ritual. As one who has been on the inside, checking their stats, True Names, and even partial skills and Noble Phantasms is entirely natural. Unless countered or protected by a special Noble Phantasm, there is no escape from this inspection as long as one participates in the Holy Grail War.
Mana Detection: A+. Capable of sensing the exact position and contracts of all Heroic Spirit Servants. Even through magecraft workshops, even with Presence Concealment A, this skill ignores all such barriers. The effective range is nearly half of Fuyuki City, and it only activates within Fuyuki City, sharing the geographical limitation common to most of her skills.
Noble Phantasms:
Seven Trials Tainted (Name Withheld): B. Seven cards in total. Each can only bear the response-summon of second or third-rate Heroic Spirit Servants.
A remnant of the Fourth Holy Grail War. Due to the Noble Phantasm's rank limitation and the fact that the wielder is no longer among the living, this Noble Phantasm can no longer link to the Throne of Heroes.
It can only call upon recorded spiritual foundations, meaning the residual echoes of the Heroic Spirit Servants from the Fourth Holy Grail War. But the Noble Phantasm's rank limitation is severe. Of the Heroic Spirit Servants from the Fourth Holy Grail War who were genuinely second or third-rate, there was essentially only Diarmuid Ua Duibhne. Combined with class restrictions, this Noble Phantasm appears to permit only a restricted form of summoning: designated borrowing, perhaps pulling a usable weapon or drawing a skill, rather than a full response-summon.
Of course, these are just the secondary functions. The truly terrifying aspect of this Noble Phantasm is the seven trials. The seven class cards, even simply stored in the card pouch at her thigh, can substitute for seven instances of fatal death. Even absolute obliteration with a shattered spiritual foundation can be rendered immune.
Blank Card: Saber B+ to A. A class card not linked to the Throne of Heroes. It is still guaranteed to receive a response. Its traits are broadly similar in effect to the Assassin class card from the Fourth Holy Grail War, but with one key difference: this time, Miss Illya has a choice.
Specifically, first using the black card to designate the shadow of a Fourth Holy Grail War Servant of the corresponding class, then using the blank card, enables a "double overlay summon." This breaks through the B+-rank Noble Phantasm limitation of accommodating only second or third-rate Heroic Spirits.
It raises the Noble Phantasm to A-rank, capable of bearing the descent of first-rate and even some super-first-rate Heroic Spirit Servants. This is also why Miss Illya can wield what appears to be Artoria's power without performing a prayer invocation: with her Luck value as low as it currently is, gambling on whether a first-rate Heroic Spirit would respond to a random summon is less reliable than using the already identified Servant echo, whose identity is a known quantity. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that the responding Heroic Spirit would even be stronger than her own current ability.
With all the bane effects and skills triggering together, she is a walking embodiment of hard work and effort, a pure numbers monster.
"Unknown enemy. I'll just take care of them first."
The blade swept. Dozens of silver threads snapped in an instant, dissolving into the surrounding grey mana mist.
One, two, three, four... six black-thread spiders, each nearly half a meter across, crawled out from the grey mist, their crimson eyes fixed straight on the surprised red man in the distance.
Miss Illya disliked this kind of unreadable enemy. Mystery meant the unknown. The unknown meant uncertainty. And uncertainty would inevitably become a form of danger. The Son of the Sun God Karna was very powerful, true.
But at least she could see through his True Name. This red man she genuinely could not read at all. She even had an inexplicable feeling that her compatibility with him was worse than with Karna, even though he had already triggered her Servant bane.
"Tch, Rin, run! I'll hold her off!"
The red-clad Archer, sensing that direct and undisguised malice, immediately stepped in front of Tohsaka Rin, concentrating mana in his left hand to produce a longbow.
A longbow with dark, muted black markings, simple and curved. The unadorned design resembled a European-style recurve bow. And alongside the bow appeared a longsword, its tip twisted into a spiral whorl shape and radiating considerable mana. In the moment the dark knight across the way summoned her familiars, it was already nocked on the bowstring.
A Noble Phantasm? The bow or the sword?
The familiar spiders plunged into the darkness, crawling at tremendous speed toward the distant enemies!
And Miss Illya, seeing the red man draw his bow and sword from far away, reacted instantly, raising her blade. The concrete beneath her armored knight-boots shattered in an instant, and she crossed several hundred meters in a single heartbeat like a streak of black light, swinging the executioner's blade down!
Boom!
And just as the black streak closed in, the red man, fully aware that his Agility stat was nowhere near the same tier as his opponent's, released his bowstring.
The spiral-shaped sword detonated with the force of divine thunder!
It was the legendary sword Caladbolg, the great sword of the Ulster hero Fergus mac Róich from Celtic mythology.
This Archer had modified it for use as an arrow, projected into existence and fired from a bow. The legend held it had been forged by the faeries of the divine lands, imbued with the thunderous might of the sky gods. As a sword it spoke for itself, but this Archer mostly used it as an arrow in "Broken Phantasm" mode, detonating it to achieve A-rank Noble Phantasm-equivalent output.
Not long ago, it was with this very blade that he had answered the probe of that powerful blazing lancer, successfully drawing a hit and dealing approximately the damage of clipping a fingernail just a little too short.
And this was that...
Fake Spiral Sword!
Clang!
Another wild mana storm erupted. The hurtling spiral sword struck the black light head-on!
The sky lit up in a brilliant explosion as though a missile had detonated. Anti-Magecraft crumbled like paper in an instant. Even the barrier formed by Mana Release couldn't stop the spiral sword by so much as a fraction, and the black mist was driven apart and scattered by the mana gale!
What even the Son of the Sun God Karna's Mana Release (Flames) had failed to achieve, this Archer had just managed, blasting straight through that terrifying Mana Release in a direct frontal impact!
"?"
Hold on. Since when did my defense get this brittle?
Armor-penetration effect? Or an anti-magecraft bane?
"...Archer? No. That technique feels more like a Caster."
It had the same aesthetic as that time in the Fourth Holy Grail War when she had loaded hundreds of familiars with modern weaponry and set them off as suicide bombers to level the Einzbern castle.
In the instant the spiral sword pierced her mana barrier, Miss Illya's expression didn't change as she swung a single sword slash to meet it, colliding with the incoming spiral blade.
Boom! Boom! BOOM!
The atmosphere roared. The night sky shuddered in lament. Ancient epic mythology manifested again. The spiral sword exploded on impact with the blade, and the violent mana shockwave toppled the surrounding uninhabited buildings. Malicious mana and the sword's energy tore into each other, each trying to consume the other, as though they had a life of their own, fighting for their master against a powerful enemy!
"...She didn't catch it?"
The surging tidal mana wave spread outward in all directions. Miss Illya landed in an open, overgrown clearing, flicked the grey dust from her face with a sweep of her blade, and her usually still small face carried, for the first time in a while, a trace of genuine bewilderment.
She...
Was knocked back?
This was a little ridiculous. With her skill boost, her Strength was already at A-rank, and on top of that her bane effect.
Sure, you broke through my Mana Release (Evil), I could accept that as your Noble Phantasm carrying some Anti-Magecraft-type effect. But pushing my Strength back too, isn't that going a bit far?
Your Noble Phantasm output reaches A-rank, sure. But my Strength is at the same rank with a bane on top. Why couldn't I push you back?
"I knocked her back? With one Broken Phantasm?"
The red-clad Archer blinked once in confusion himself.
That couldn't be right. By any rational assessment, if she had managed to push back that sun-like white lancer, a single Broken Phantasm from him shouldn't have sent her flying. Especially with that terrifying torrent of mana. That had to be a high-rank Mana Release skill.
A Mana Release of this caliber, a certain enthusiastic citizen by the name of Gil could tank a few rounds of his Noble Phantasm torrent face-first. How could it be penetrated by a single A-rank Noble Phantasm?
"No, wait. Fighting that Lancer left her in bad shape too. Her vitality and stamina are over-depleted..."
CRASH!
Savage black mana clung to the black sword, pressure surging as though about to tear the earth apart. Miss Illya gripped the sword in one hand and swept it lightly backward!
The black sword-light began to expand and stretch. One meter. Five meters. Ten meters. Twenty meters of terrifying length in a heartbeat!
The red Archer's eyes went wide again, watching the black radiance fill his pupils. Did this girl's mana come from an infinite well?!
"Whose Servant is this? Burning mana like this, aren't you worried about draining your Master dry?!"
Naturally, no one was going to give him an answer.
The powerful, soul-shaking sword-light swept in at blinding speed. The three-story townhouse it touched was bisected in an instant, sliced apart like a fusion-cut cake. Black mana-flames burned fiercely between heaven and earth. The red Archer vaulted aside, and the sweeping blade-aura grazed his body by the narrowest of margins.
The scorching heat and the odor of corruption made his tongue click involuntarily. This extravagant use of mana purely for output was almost incomprehensible. Like an infuriated little wildcat, one touch and you'd be shredded.
She wasn't Artoria.
Absolutely not.
Because even hypothetically, if Artoria's Master had been Rin, she still couldn't have afforded to burn mana this freely.
Top-tier Three Knight-class Servants who weren't perpetually short on mana were the rare exception, not the rule.
Clang!
Two short swords appeared in his hands. The instant he landed, they caught the chasing black blade in a shower of sparks that illuminated even the night with the brilliant sheen of silver hair. The small girl whose face was hidden behind a black visor.
Short blades inscribed with yin-yang markings, one black and one white, formed entirely from mana.
"Again, a Noble Phantasm? Just how many Noble Phantasms do you have?"
"Can you calculate how much mana you have?"
"..."
Black-and-white twin blades danced between sword strikes. Hearing the girl's voice, somehow both familiar and unfamiliar, the red man maintained his composure with room to spare.
Blade and sword flew in a dazzling flurry that swept the ground. The red man fought while retreating.
A succession of cracking, shattering sounds rang out. The twin black-and-white blade Noble Phantasms breaking one after another.
But to everyone's surprise, those twin blades seemed to be in infinite supply. Miss Illya destroyed one and two would appear. Destroy two, and four would appear. Her opponent nimbly evaded her attacks, seemingly well aware he couldn't meet her head-on, constantly abandoning his weapons to create distance.
Over nearly ten exchanges of close-quarters combat, he was as slippery as a loach, impossible to pin down.
"You were hurt, weren't you? Or rather, you've overextended yourself in the fight against the Lancer."
Bang!
A heavy sword blow shattered the twin blades again. The heavy armored greave, mana flowing through it, swung in a high side kick that connected squarely with the red Archer's waist!
Backed by mana, it sent him hurtling back dozens of meters!
"Well, it's not really learning from experience if you won't retreat when you're in bad shape, is it."
The red Archer, who had blocked with his forearm, winced and shook his wrist while still talking to buy time, trying to disrupt her judgment.
Miss Illya retracted her side kick and her expression became a little strange.
This didn't make sense. Her stats clearly crushed his. Why was the damage she was dealing even more negligible than what she'd achieved as Assassin?
"...Counter Guardian."
This was.
The one origin she couldn't counter-bane that would actually reverse-counter her.