This self-proclaimed Ruler was unquestionably the single most troublesome piece in this Holy Grail War. But her Master was so young—could she actually handle the massive prana drain such a Servant required?
Kiritsugu, still sighting through his rifle, shifted his view off Yimi and onto Ritsuka.
He hadn't set up the sniper's nest here just to see which Servants had shown up. He was watching for a Master to slip up and give him an opening. No matter how powerful a Servant might be, once the Master was dead and the prana supply cut off, the Servant wouldn't last long before dissipating.
Still, recalling that while scanning for Lancer's Master earlier he'd caught a fleeting glimpse of Assassin, and given that Ritsuka had called out his presence the moment she'd taken the field, he put the idea aside as too dangerous.
"I came expecting a dull bit of theatre. I didn't expect to find something this entertaining." Archer narrowed his crimson eyes on Yimi, then let them linger a while longer on Ritsuka Fujimaru.
His brow suddenly furrowed—something from his Master, by the look of it. "A presumptuous suggestion, Tokiomi... Fine. With all the actors cleared from the stage, there's no point in staying to watch."
He was the last one to leave.
"That Goldie over there is the most troublesome piece in this Holy Grail War aside from Caster. But you seem to have summoned a real trump card, Ritsuka." El-Melloi commented.
Beyond the Four Horsemen identity, what was more surprising was that this Servant turned out to be unexpectedly easy to work with—even if, in certain respects, she didn't follow any sort of standard logic whatsoever.
He didn't know the fine details of what Gilgamesh pulled off in this Holy Grail War, but the man's identity alone already put him at the ceiling of what ordinary Holy Grail Wars produced. And in the normal course of events, Rider was the one who'd be killed by him. If he could manage it, El-Melloi very much wanted Gilgamesh taken down first—
"Fujimaru, are you okay?" El-Melloi checked on Ritsuka first.
"I'm not hurt, Professor Kongming."
"No, I don't mean injuries. I'm asking about your prana consumption."
This was a summoning method unlike the standard one, after all, and Ritsuka's own Magus ability was probably below where his own had been in his youth.
"I haven't used any at all, Professor Kongming." Ritsuka looked around at the vast patch of cleared ground. "Can this still count as discreetly conducted?"
She genuinely didn't understand what had happened. She hadn't even seen the Stand attack Yimi had thrown out; she'd only heard Saber suddenly, with a grave look on her face, call out Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The Four Horsemen had to count as top-tier Servants, right? If Yimi really was a proper entrant in this Holy Grail War, did that mean they were pretty much guaranteed to win?
Then why had her dream been about chasing a train?
Mr. El-Melloi II's brain was smoking. "How can she not have used any prana? Is this another Unequal Exchange effect from one of her Noble Phantasms? That kind of Noble Phantasm is completely broken. In a normal Holy Grail War it would be the equivalent of handing the winner their trophy on arrival."
"Sure, but—" Ritsuka was more concerned with something else. "Doing that much damage in a city that isn't even a Singularity... we don't have to pay for any of it, do we? If the Knight of Injustice has a Noble Phantasm, could she compress the reparations bill down to one yen?"
"What are you even talking about?! You can't use the power of the Apocalypse for that!" Dr. Roman cut in.
"The First Spirit did it." Yimi raised a paw, trying to shift the blame onto someone who didn't even exist in this world.
"The First Spirit? Who is that? Don't worry about it—the Holy Church will clean this up. You two should leave the area first." El-Melloi pinched the bridge of his nose, fighting a headache. "We were supposed to use Ruler's authority as arbiter to have a proper conversation with all the Masters about the Grail's problems. But even if we try to explain calmly, nobody's going to believe us now."
She'd already been firmly labeled a blatantly biased referee. Which, in fairness, was exactly what she was.
"More importantly than any of that—Ruler, your Noble Phantasm isn't actually the Spear of Longinus, is it?" Dr. Roman cut in again.
"Yeah."
"Huh?" Ritsuka turned to stare at Yimi's little hand. The spear, wildly out of scale with a child's body, had already been put away somewhere.
The Spear of Longinus. Even someone who hadn't spent hours grinding through mythology for a Holy Grail War knew what it was. Strictly speaking it was only an ordinary spear—but it happened to belong to Saint Longinus, and Saint Longinus had used it to wound Jesus on the cross.
Whether it really had been ordinary was beside the point. With that name, with the mythology stacked on top of it as a Noble Phantasm bonus, it was almost certainly one of the highest-tier anti-Divinity Noble Phantasms in existence.
"So it really is..." Dr. Roman drew in a deep breath.
Unlike Dr. Roman—tangled up in whatever train of thought was bothering him—El-Melloi II looked significantly more relaxed. "Gilgamesh carries divine blood. That spear should be able to take him out with ease."
The little kitten looked entirely uninterested. "The red guy. Does he have Divinity?"
"Stop fixating on him! Right now you should take out the one you can't negotiate with!" El-Melloi's protectiveness was oddly out of character.
"Rua~"
The cat thought that the redhead was the one you couldn't negotiate with. That Goldie hadn't said a single word to the cat the whole time he was there.
"What do we do next? Go home and sleep?" Ritsuka led Yimi off the field first.
Yimi planted the butt of her spear on the ground and summoned the ominous black horse.
The horse promptly clamped its teeth on the back of the little girl's collar and flipped her up onto its own back, then repeated the move on Ritsuka, who was still trying to back up.
Even with the horse, Yimi didn't have the Riding skill. She controlled it entirely through sheer force of will.
"No. If this Holy Grail War really does roughly match what I remember, the one we should move to eliminate first is, after all, Caster." El-Melloi's tone carried a rare trace of disgust.
Caster—true name Gilles de Rais, once a follower of Jeanne d'Arc, the historical basis for Bluebeard. He'd been a decorated marshal in his prime. After retiring, he'd thrown himself into alchemy, fallen further and further into depravity, and had tortured more than three hundred children to death.
Ritsuka had reason to remember him. In the First Singularity, this very figure had summoned a dark version of Jeanne.
His Master this time was no prize either. Ryuunosuke Uryuu: a serial murderer roaming Fuyuki, who shared Caster's taste for killing children. He'd essentially been scraped into the lineup by the Grail itself, padding the War to keep it running.
"If our signal hadn't cut out, I would have had you come over last night. I hate to think how many more victims there were in just one night." El-Melloi's voice was tight with regret.
This was a parallel world, after all. Not a Singularity that would self-correct back onto the rails of history no matter what was done.
A sewer entrance. This was Caster's den—entirely fitting for the twisted mentality the master-and-servant shared.
"Blood," Yimi said, sniffing the air. "Human."
"Fujimaru. Brace yourself."
Ritsuka frowned and brought up a light.
Even at this early stage of the Holy Grail War, when Caster should only have been freshly summoned... the place had the bodies of children piled up everywhere, abducted here by Caster and his Master.
About ten minutes earlier, Caster had still been here.
"Unforgivable, my Jeanne, aaaaaah!" His eyes bulged until they were nearly out of their sockets. Caster clutched his head in both hands, letting out a truly unsettling wail. "Accursed god!"
"Master, do you know her?" Ryuunosuke leaned in curiously.
"My fated maiden, that sacred, inviolable figure—there's no mistake, that is Jeanne, absolutely, incontestably!" Caster jabbed at the crystal ball in front of him like a madman, though the person he was pointing at was long gone from its surface.
Because the Saber who, yes, looked like Jeanne had already been pulled off the field by Kiritsugu's Command Spell.
"What a cruel God—abandoning so devout a maiden, and even now he reaches in to take her away from us? Unforgivable... unforgivable!" He shook the crystal ball in fury, as though trying to beat the yolk out of an egg.