"Unforgivable... to ambush someone mid-sentence... vile servant of God..."
Caster. Arguably the Servant with the highest Master–Servant affinity in this entire Holy Grail War—though in truth, before Caster personally explained it to him, his Master Ryuunosuke hadn't even known what the Holy Grail War was. Ryuunosuke was, strictly speaking, filler: a warm body thrown in to make up the numbers, a coincidence as much as anything.
After all, he did carry magus blood. He'd spent the last few days on a whim rummaging through a warehouse and stumbling across some demon-summoning literature. Then he'd slaughtered a family and kept only the youngest son alive—a boy who conveniently functioned as a catalyst.
Because their affinity ran so high, he was one of the few to hit it off with his Servant from the start. They spent long hours discussing and practicing what truly artistic child-murder looked like.
"So it ends here, does it... Not only Jeanne—now even I have been forsaken by God..." He watched the long spear pull free from his chest.
The wound wasn't lethal on its own. But after pulling out the spear, the little kitty followed up with a swipe of her claws, leaving him to starve to death in a hunger even Yimi herself found repulsive.
Yimi hated this man. Very, very much.
Caster could feel it—his own prana draining away in an agonizing fashion.
How could it be like this?!
He glared hatefully at God's representative standing in front of him, roughly the same age as the children he'd butchered, as though her entire appearance had been tailored to be his reckoning.
"Ryuunosuke, use the Command Spells! All of them!"
"Command Spells? Let me remember... by the power of the Command Spell..."
Not far off, Ryuunosuke hurried to comply.
[Prelati's Spellbook]
Rank: A+
Type: Anti-Army Noble Phantasm
Range: 1–10
Max Targets: 100
It took the form of a grimoire bound in human skin—technically, you could treat it as a living thing, or even as a prana furnace, since it allowed the caster to invoke powerful spells without drawing on his own magical energy.
Even so, unlocking its full effect normally required preparatory sigils—and that was exactly the kind of thing Command Spells existed to override by letting a Heroic Spirit exceed their usual performance.
For instance, Kariya—had he wanted to—could have used a Command Spell to make Lancelot mimic someone else's appearance, even though Berserker Lancelot had no such Noble Phantasm. In life, he'd been legendary for impersonating others to claim their glory; Mad Enhancement had just regressed that into crude camouflage.
"What an agonizing exit... Watch carefully, servant of God..." Even though it was only prana draining away, the hunger was withering his flesh into something unrecognizable. Just before he vanished, he fixed his eyes on Yimi's face, as though he were sensing the radiance of Divinity through some veil.
How dazzling it was. And yet—yet why wouldn't it bestow even a single warm mote upon that pure, noble maiden...
Saved Yimi the trouble of a finishing blow, at least. Rather convenient.
"How could this be... Master Bluebeard!" A mournful voice carried over from some distance away. "How could you die so unartistically?!"
"Ruler, let's take him out together." Ritsuka looked over with disgust.
"Master. Something's there." Yimi turned toward the Kobe Bridge in the distance—more precisely, toward the river beneath it.
"His Noble Phantasm?" Ritsuka looked. A layer of strange, creeping fog was spreading and rising, threaded through with prana that made her stomach turn.
Caster's Noble Phantasm had one ultimate trump card: the summoning of a sea-demon colossal enough to slaughter the entirety of Fuyuki City. In fact, his own prana alone wasn't enough to control such a creature—and even three Command Spells wouldn't change the fact that Yimi was draining him at this very moment.
But so what? All he needed to do was supply the prana to summon it. Whatever the sea-demon did once it arrived had nothing to do with him.
Since it was a sea-demon, and there happened to be a large body of water nearby, it surfaced from exactly the direction you'd expect.
Ritsuka steadied the red-haired boy, who was disoriented after being released from control. "Can you handle that, Ruler?"
"Probably." Yimi rummaged through her storage space.
She called out the black horse and swung onto it, kicking little legs that couldn't quite clear its belly as she looked down at Ritsuka.
Ritsuka gave the boy's shoulder a shake. "You go on ahead, Ruler. I've still got a murderer to deal with here. If anything comes up, I'll use a Command Spell to call you back."
"Mm."
Yimi steered the black horse toward the riverbank, a Doom-shroom card already in her hand.
Since she'd last used one to feed the mushroom to a demon in the previous world, not even two days had gone by. The card was still in black-and-white.
She rubbed the card between her hands and activated her Stand—or rather, her Noble Phantasm adapted to this world.
Scales of Injustice.
The black mushroom was out in her arms, throwing her a sullen glare and then a pointed look at the card.
The kitty pushed past her own reluctance, stuffed a handful of catnip—originally meant for her mom and grandma—into the mushroom's mouth as payment for forcibly shortening its cooldown, and then hurled it at the giant sea-demon.
With a piercing shriek, the sea-demon lashed out a massive tendril, scooped up the mushroom, and fed it into the central maw.
"Yo, Saber. You feel this prana too?" Up above, Rider ran into Saber, who was racing toward the riverbank on motorcycle. "Honestly, barely a moment to relax, and we've had this on the first day already? Is the Apocalypse Knight little girl doing this?"
"No, this should be the true Caster. He was just harassing me."
Before going to make trouble with Yimi, Caster—who had stubbornly convinced himself Saber was Jeanne—had flagged her down and given her a long, baffling speech. By the time she got home, she discovered Yimi had ransacked his lair.
It was nearly past midnight, yet plenty of onlookers were still lingering by the river—drawn by enchantment, or simply the lure of spectacle.
"Haw haw... doesn't look like a Servant fight, though. Is this Caster the kind who attacks civilians?" The Conqueror King looked up, watching two fighter jets streak overhead. "This 'fighter jet' thing is quite something. I must figure out how to get my hands on a few..."
"Rider, what is that thing?!" Waver cried out, alarmed.
With Caster—its prana source—gone, the sea-demon couldn't hold itself together for long. Acting on instinct, it began moving toward the shore to replenish prana by the most primitive means available.
A vast wave was pushed aside. The creature's full form finally took shape—yet surprisingly few of the gathered people panicked and fled.
Watching through a sniper scope in the distance, Kiritsugu frowned. "Saber. Use your Noble Phantasm to destroy it."
It would expose a card of theirs early. But he couldn't let a thing that size loose on a crowd.
"No. Wait. Ruler is going in..."
Astride her horse, the little kitty hurled the mushroom and immediately clamped her hands over the ears on top of her head.
No prana signature was registering. But Saber's Intuition—usually reserved for reading attacks—was hammering out a frantic warning.
"What is that? Everyone, get out of here!" The men in the fighter jets looked as though some bloodline instinct was screaming at them.
The Doom-shroom had enough firepower to wipe out an entire island. To keep it from vaporizing Fuyuki, Yimi tucked the Spear of Longinus aside and used Love Train to redirect the blast's area of effect outward. Usually she couldn't manage operations that precise, but in this world it came more easily.
"BOOOOOM—"
A towering mushroom cloud shot into the sky. That terribly familiar silhouette ripped awake something deep and ancestral in the locals. Even with Love Train throttling the yield, the whole of Fuyuki felt the ground shake; the closer residents couldn't keep their footing.
The explosion scoured away the prana-laden fog. Some time later, as the mushroom cloud dissipated, what was revealed to the watchers was a vast crater cutting the river clean in half—with not a drop of water showing any inclination to flow in and fill it.
"Wha—?"
...
"And what kind of Noble Phantasm was that mushroom cloud? Anyone who didn't know better would think it was a Servant Oppen—" Ritsuka caught herself mid-tangent about a topic she had no business raising. She drove the Mystic Code she carried for self-defense into Ryuunosuke's neck, slitting his throat.
"Ghh—ghh—" Ryuunosuke made a strangled, rasping sound, collapsing onto his back, eyes glassy.
As a magus, Ritsuka left a lot to be desired. But after surviving countless Singularities, handling one subdued cultist was well within her ability.
She stared at the serial killer on the ground with something between fury and pity—because even as his life signs faded, he'd managed a look of pure bliss, as though he'd just realized his life's greatest wish.
For someone who had butchered that many children, this death was far too easy. But the small amount of kindness still in Ritsuka kept her from going further while a child was watching.
"Y-you?!" The red-haired boy gave a terrified yelp and scrambled away from her.
"I did save your life, you know..."