Flame and smoke blanketed the scorched earth.
The land, charred by roaring fire, was a dull, dead black. The intense heat had warped the very atmosphere, making the air twist and ripple as though caught in the height of summer. The rising temperature had flushed Miss Illya's skin red.
Even the sword hilt in her grip felt like a scalding iron rod. The small hand holding it had developed several blisters.
Karna felt his luck was a little poor for encountering her on the very first night, right when he was at a disadvantage in terms of matchup.
But how was her luck any better?
As a Three Knight-class Servant, she could hold her own against top-tier, first-rate Heroic Spirits. But of all the miserable luck, the very first night threw at her something above top-tier, a monster she could barely keep up with even at near full effort.
A divine-attribute counter? She was countering absolutely nothing. The amplification that A-rank birth divinity gave him was terrifying. Setting that aside, she and him were currently at something like a draw, but in reality, neither her Mana Release (Evil) in a direct clash, nor her sword strikes, could actually break through the Son of the Sun God, Karna's, defense.
God above, what rotten luck. She had already obtained the strongest class.
Her own Master wasn't someone with Kotomine Kirei's background either.
Both were supposed to be excellent things. So why, the very moment she was summoned via relic, did she run into a great hero she genuinely struggled to beat?
She'd take on the Golden King Gilgamesh over this any day. At least he was weaker in both ranged and close combat than this opponent, and unlike Gilgamesh, this man wasn't a chuunibyou. Fighting someone like this in the first battle, a matchup that looked impossible to win no matter how you looked at it.
Sigh. She had done her best. Karna wielded the power of his divine heritage. He was undefeatable.
Clang! BOOM!
In the instant the meteor struck the earth.
Knight's sword against spear, the clash split the ground asunder, and the spear's reputation as king of all weapons was no empty boast.
The clash between the dark fae and the son of the sun lit up the night sky. Two battling Servants revived the myths of fantasy before the living world. In the space of a single breath, the heavens and earth were transformed. Surges of mana and tides of flame cascaded to the ground, erupting in deafening explosions!
The world seemed to become a stage centered on the two of them alone. Even the familiars of other Servants who had been drawn near swiftly withdrew from this battlefield that was beyond all mortal interference!
What onlookers saw were afterimages and phantoms no human eye, and few Servant eyes, could track. In a single instant, dozens upon dozens of exchanges of attack and defense unfolded. No one could comprehend why these two Servants possessed such staggering power, let alone how the dark fae could possibly keep pace with the son of the sun. But the dark fae was, without question, an existence that even the son of the sun had to regard with care. This was myth. This was epic. Two ancient legends, stepped out of dream and fantasy, made real!
"Being suppressed..."
Sword and spear. Dark god and god of light. Myth and epic. The apex of martial arts and the apex of mana detonation.
Their speed and strength had long since transcended ordinary understanding. Sonic booms rang out in an unending chain.
The spirit wielding a longsword and commanding malice, and the great hero unleashing unsurpassed martial skill.
The battlefield between them permitted no other intrusion.
Bang!
The spear drove forward. A boom rang out! Having already begun to slip slightly in the close-quarters exchange, Miss Illya reacted instantly and without hesitation, abandoning the sword. She reached out and grabbed the blazing spear edge trying to pierce her heart bare-handed, and then, before Karna's bewildered eyes, silver hair expanded in his reflected pupils as she closed the distance at terrifying speed!
"Headbutt."
A sudden impact struck Karna's jaw, staggering him back for just an instant.
He clearly had not anticipated that a Saber-class Servant, Miss Illya, would dare to discard the partner a warrior relies on, and use a headbutt under attribute suppression to catch him completely off guard.
Splat!
Blood from his mouth and nose from the sudden strike. His tongue had been nicked by his own teeth.
"Abandoning your own weapon. That was your most mistaken decision."
But in only that single instant of being driven back.
Karna calmly wiped the corner of his mouth, and lightly drove his spear into the ground.
In the next moment, the earth for a hundred meters in every direction ruptured and exploded upward like cotton, blasted apart by flames erupting from below. Endless debris flew skyward, obscuring for just a moment Miss Illya's vision before she could retrieve the black sword. His silhouette vanished. The turbulent mana currents made Miss Illya lose track of her target.
Hot...
Her class skill's mana activation kept Illya, standing atop a chunk of upward-flying debris, from being incinerated.
But the surging heat and thick smoke still left her eyes stinging with tears.
"Where is he?"
Miss Illya tried to use her senses to locate him and brace for a defense, looking frantically left and right.
But the shrapnel filling the sky and the accompanying flames gave her no way to confirm Karna's location.
"Now, without a sword, how will you dodge this?"
A calm voice came from above. Karna's silhouette became visible at an altitude of roughly a thousand meters.
His blazing spear swept through the air once more, and flames surged outward like a geyser. The airborne debris began to burn within just two or three seconds, each chunk becoming a small sun of several meters in diameter, just like before, and then, in the manner of that famous scene from a certain anime, they compressed inward on Miss Illya from every direction, closing in to seal and crush her!
They converged. They fused. They evolved. Becoming a terrifying gaseous nebula that even a top-tier Heroic Spirit would not lightly approach, like a "small planetoid" freshly born.
This was control of mana refined to the subtlest degree. This was total mastery over flame.
Kirei's confidence that Karna could take Miss Illya alive was never arrogance or overconfidence.
It was because this Son of the Sun God truly possessed power approaching, even rivaling, Gilgamesh at the time of the port battle in the Fourth Holy Grail War. That terrifying force capable of completely suppressing five Heroic Servants simultaneously. The only downside was the mana consumption, which would drain even a great magus dry.
But that hardly mattered now. There was nothing left to fear, because once he had captured Illyasviel von Einzbern, that humanoid mana reactor...
Karna's one and only weakness would be compensated for...
Damn Luck F. Bastard of a fate. Do you want me dead on the very first night?
Hmph. But this still isn't enough. You want to kill me? This level of suppression is nowhere near enough to make me give up!
"Noble Phantasm, deploy."
Pressed to the point where the heat and flames had begun to make her skin fester, Miss Illya murmured softly.
From the second card pouch on her black princess dress, she drew out a second card.
Utterly unlike the first dim, matte black card, this one was brilliant gold, exquisitely engraved with the image of a swordsman.
Rustle.
Karna raised his spear and slashed downward from above. In the next instant, a crisp resonance rang out. The planet collapsed. Not a metaphor: it genuinely detonated!
The terrifying blazing mana of the spear edge poured into every crack of that artificial asteroid, and in this moment it erupted like a volcanic blast, the entire world seeming to freeze. Output rivaling an anti-army-rank Noble Phantasm, sufficient to obliterate even a top-ranked great magus along with a magecraft workshop capable of resisting Heroic Servants. The artificial meteoroid detonated utterly!
Bang! BOOM!
"Fantasy Summon, Double Overlay."
"?!"
The Son of the Sun God, who had seriously committed to that anti-army-rank strike, felt his usually still, beautiful pupils contract by the tiniest fraction. He saw a pillar of light cutting through heaven and earth. Or rather, a mana beam that cut from the inside out in all four directions simultaneously, like that pillar of light.
The detonating asteroid, within two seconds, vomited from top to bottom, left to right, eruptions of viciously malicious mana-light in every direction, a laser beam ignoring all pressure and flame, a cross-shaped star cutting through the world.
That dark fae had not been fighting at full power earlier either!
"She can... remotely recall her own weapon? No. That isn't a recall."
"She reset the weapon's state and reshaped it. The black knight's sword from before wasn't its true Noble Phantasm form at all."
The cross-shaped asteroid's mana surge came crashing in. In a split second, Karna reacted and made his judgment, immediately flying clear of his position. But unfortunately, in this wide-open sky with no cover and no escape, he was one step too slow. The violent roar of the shockwave swept away virtually every cloud in the area. The mana beam swept across the top of the residential district in a wide fan.
Every sleeping resident of the residential district brushed past the hands of death in that moment!
The position where Karna had been standing took a direct hit from the black beam, detonating a brilliant mushroom cloud in the sky, a cross-star clearly visible from several kilometers away!
The lamentation of the atmosphere echoed across the world. The Son of the Sun God seemed to have become dust.
Only the heat and countless wisps of gunsmoke lingering in the air of the residential district remained to prove that this Heroic Spirit Servant had once existed in this world.
"...A battle like this, in a supposedly secret ritual of a Holy Grail War, and no one thought to observe some basic limits?"
From a rooftop several buildings outside the residential district, viewing through a customized magecraft telescope, Matou Shinji felt genuine astonishment at the cross-shaped mushroom cloud that had illuminated the entire residential district. At the same time, something stirred inside him. Not fear, but excitement. Gratitude. Gratitude that he had been fortunate enough to participate in this kind of magecraft ritual within his lifetime.
He had known that Heroic Spirit Servants were a collection of ancient monsters unbound by common sense.
But just two unnamed Servants clashing, and with a single careless mistake in the exchange, the entire residential district and everything for several kilometers around could be obliterated. That was a bit too ridiculously powerful.
Exaggerated. Far too exaggerated. Individual combat capability like that, unleashed in a densely populated major city, would give any nation a headache that could not be easily resolved.
Because even nuclear weapons could not simply be dropped on a populated city.
"Magecraft. This is magecraft! Technology cannot reach it, physics lies trampled underfoot, Newton's coffin lid has been nailed shut, Darwin's theory of human evolution is given its ultimate insult, the brilliance of the Age of Gods made manifest within the modern world through a magecraft ritual!"
"To seek truth within this magecraft ritual, it would be worth it even to die!"
And if unnamed Servants could be this powerful, what heights of terror must the legendary pinnacle of the Holy Grail War ritual, the Age of Gods magus Medea, have reached?
Wouldn't a single magecraft incantation from her be enough to suppress both of these battling heroes?
Shinji narrowed his eyes slightly, seemingly in thought. He had never participated in a Holy Grail War. Since leaving the Matou family, his understanding of power rankings among Heroic Servants had been limited. All he knew was that the Age of Gods magus Medea stood at the absolute peak, and that only the remaining two of the Three Knights, besides the Saber class, could barely keep pace with her.
Therefore, in his judgment, he could only conclude that both battling heroes ranked below Medea, and that the Age of Gods magus Medea was probably even more terrifying than he had imagined. He would need to make more thorough preparations before attempting to capture her.
Right. Capture. His arrangement with Zouken Matou was straightforward.
Capture the Master of the Age of Gods magus Medea. Neither of them had said anything about killing Medea herself.
Which meant that without anyone bringing it up openly, there was already an unspoken understanding between them.
Both of them figured that since they couldn't beat Medea in a fight, they would capture her Master and coerce a transfer of the contract, then use the Age of Gods magus Medea to win the Holy Grail War's final victory. It just came down to who managed to actually secure the contract in the end.
"I need to move faster. After confirming Emiya's safety, I have to deal with Medea's Master within three days. Delays only increase variables..."
As for Medea's Master, he had already done a fairly thorough investigation using his hacking skills.
Name: Atrum Galliasta. A mixed-blood oil-money magus from the Middle East. His personal magecraft ability was nothing impressive, not even fully open rank. But he was extraordinarily wealthy with extensive resources. He had previously hired Aozaki Touko, one of the Clock Tower's three great colors. And in various rumors, he was said to be on quite good terms with a certain recently-risen Clock Tower Lord, which meant he likely possessed certain expensive cards up his sleeve that even great magi might not have access to.
But it didn't matter. Because although the Age of Gods magus Medea was powerful, her reputation preceded her.
The Heroic Servants and magus targeting her would not be limited to his camp alone.
He and Zouken Matou only needed to play opportunists in the chaos of whoever moved to bring Medea down...
Boom.
Landing on a chunk of debris plummeting rapidly downward, one knee on the rock, catching herself with a hand against the stone surface.
"I should have hit him..."
Miss Illya looked through the cascading sparks and debris toward where the Son of the Sun God, seemingly disintegrated by her mana beam, had been.
A tiny ripple disturbed the still surface of her dark, calm eyes, revealing just a trace of mild surprise.
Not surprise that this powerful Heroic Spirit had been killed so easily.
Rather, because she had distinctly felt her attack connect with her target. By common sense, at his altitude in the open sky, even with his speed, he shouldn't have been able to outrun the sweep of her mana beam. And yet, to her astonishment, he had taken it head-on and seemed to have immediately relocated after tanking the attack directly.
"The golden armor, a Noble Phantasm integrated with my physical body. It reduces all hostile physical attacks, magecraft attacks, curses, and negative conceptual interference to one-tenth their effect. And it can repair damage, including fatal wounds."
The blazing spear edge emerged from behind a chunk of debris. Miss Illya caught it with a reverse grip on her sword and slashed. The clash of blades revealed Karna's silhouette, blazing spear once again meeting black sword.
Karna seized her sword with both hands on his spear, driving down on the dark fae now armored in black streaked with red, pressing her in at brilliant meteor-speed toward the earth below, breaking through the heavy atmosphere, baring the ferocity of a divine son!
BOOM!!
The thunderous crash echoed outward. The blazing meteor slammed into the earth in a deafening, mournful impact, gouging yet another crater dozens of meters wide into the already ruined residential plaza. The terrible reactive force of falling at the speed of sound was enough to crush anything on the food chain into pulp!
Flames erupted. The abyss-deep pit was swallowed in rising smoke and dust. Blood splattered in the darkness.
Even a Heroic Spirit Servant, after sustaining this level of sustained high-intensity impact, would be injured. So by any rational measure, this surprise-attack blow from Karna should have been enough to decide the outcome.
But then again, hadn't Karna faced the same calculation when he tanked that black cross-star of hers?
"Is this your true form? That black armor, could it be that in life you were a dark knight?"
Standing in the dozens-of-meters-deep crater filled with rolling smoke, looking down at the empty ground beneath his feet.
Karna's fingertips and chest seeped faint traces of blood. Those were wounds from the dark fae's earlier strikes. Shallow, and already healing quickly.
Still, it was genuinely strange. The wounds were minor, but he had undeniably been hurt. His senses had told him the damage from that cross-star beam was insufficient to breach his defenses. And yet his golden armor had still failed to prevent some form of injury.
He tilted his head slightly in quiet puzzlement, then with one casual sweep of his right hand and its blazing spear...
Effortlessly dispersed the billowing smoke rolling in all directions.
"Truly a foul Noble Phantasm."
The smoke cleared. The dark fae's silhouette emerged.
Black and red knight's armor, covering her entire body, completely different from before. Full armament.
A black steel visor concealed her small face. The black longsword in her hand seemed as though it had truly been unleashed at last, radiating a mana aura that made the spirit recoil.
Black mana like muddy water crept up the fae's body, leaving dark markings along her neck, thighs, and small face. The whole figure looked like a knight consumed by frenzied malice. The mana beneath her had become dark mud seeping into and contaminating the burning earth, forming a firm barrier against the inextinguishable flames still burning nearby.
Karna had sustained no significant injuries. Likewise, she had taken no critical damage.
"How about we stop here for tonight? The commotion has grown somewhat large."
"Your mana reserves are nearly exhausted. Why should I let you go?"
Miss Illya rejected Karna's suggestion. He was extraordinarily powerful. She couldn't even breach his defenses. But great power so often came at a cost.
The mana flames around him had grown thin and feeble now. The hallmark of a Servant running low on reserves.
While her stamina and vitality had taken a toll, her mana was still quite plentiful.
She couldn't beat him in the early-to-middle phases, but if she could drag it out until he could no longer maintain the golden armor, she wasn't without a chance of victory.
"Then, let this one strike decide the outcome."
Surging flames once more poured across the spear.
Karna emptied the last of his mana without reservation, then with one hand reversed the grip on his spear and stepped lightly into the flames, rising into the sky. The scarlet skin was swept by the wild mana wind in churning waves. The spear edge was now completely engulfed and buried in brilliance.
This was not Mana Release. Nor any skill.
This was a Noble Phantasm release.
Hard to imagine: on the very first night of a Holy Grail War, a Servant was already releasing their Noble Phantasm in battle. Because in theory, the first night was supposed to be a probing phase. Starting off in an all-out killing exchange while short on intelligence meant only being targeted and eliminated by other Servants in the middle and later stages.
"Noble Phantasm."
Anti-country class Noble Phantasm.
Rank A+.
Performance far exceeding the already vast anti-army Noble Phantasm. Likened to a nuclear weapon among ultimate techniques.
"Your commotion is clearly bigger than mine, isn't it."
Avalanche-like annihilating light built and gathered above in the sky. A transcendental mythological epic capable of bringing down a modern fortress was rapidly forming over Miss Illya's head.
Due to insufficient mana from both his Master's supply and his own reserves, this strike was clearly somewhat rushed, unable to release its true complete form.
But even like this, it was still terrifying. Without going all out, Miss Illya couldn't possibly receive it.
"Noble Phantasm."
Both hands gripping the sword held alongside her cheek, Miss Illya's mana output also peaked at some absolute level.
Black-red radiance and red lightning flickered. The blade in her hand expanded at tremendous speed.
She pressed the black sword to the ground. Her silver hair was blown into the air. Every last bit of mana she could currently mobilize poured into the blade, like a defiant mortal rising in rebellion against the gods in the highest heavens. The explosive crackle of compressed mana made the soul shudder.
Noble Phantasm versus Noble Phantasm. On one side, a malicious fae. On the other, the Son of the Sun God.
A city-class Noble Phantasm with full mana, against a country-class Noble Phantasm with barely enough mana to sustain it.
"Come!"
A mutual, unspoken resolve to give everything!
This one strike decided supremacy, and decided life and death!
"Ex...!"
"Burn the heavens...!"
Both Noble Phantasms primed and aimed at their enemy. The black sword fired a pillar of light.
The blazing spear assumed a throwing posture from above, angling downward.
And then, in the very moment before the Noble Phantasms were released.
A ripple of mana, stretched out through information-type magecraft, began propagating across Fuyuki City.
"I, Caster, the Age of Gods magus Medea."
"Hereby declare war upon the Saber. Declare war upon the Lancer. Declare war upon the Archer. Declare war upon the Assassin. Declare war upon the Rider. Declare war upon the Berserker... by command of my Master, in the name of the Age of Gods magus, I announce to all combatants in this Holy Grail War a declaration of total war!"