The forest road wound south beneath a canopy that filtered the grey morning into something greener. Birdsong threaded through the branches, and somewhere off to the left a stream ran unseen over stones, its murmur rising and falling as the road curved toward it and away.
Griswald walked near the back of the little column, only half-listening to the conversation ahead. Jeanne was explaining something about the abbey to Ritsuka, and Mash had drifted a little to one side to peer up at a woodpecker hammering at a dead trunk, her mouth slightly open in wonder.
He couldn't blame her. He was doing the same.
He'd been to France once, years ago, dragged along on some family errand to the Clock Tower's Parisian affiliate. But that had been all stone and lamplight with only the sour disappointment on his father's face from another failed attempt to climb the ladder as a souvenir. He'd never seen this. Green hills folding away between the trees, wildflowers crowding the ditch beside the road, the whole living smell of soil and leaf and water. It made his chest ache in a way he didn't have a word for.
Mash caught his eye and smiled, and he understood that she felt it too.
Then he made the mistake of glancing forward.
Ritsuka had turned. She was walking half-backward now, watching him, and when their eyes met she winked.
Griswald's stomach dropped.
He knew that look. He gave a small, frantic shake of his head. No. Don't. Whatever you're thinking, don't.
Ritsuka's grin widened.
"Say, Jeanne," she said, brightly, spinning back around and matching pace with the Ruler. "Can I ask you something?"
"Of course," Jeanne said.
"Did you ever think about it? Back when you were alive, I mean. Marriage. Kids. All that." Ritsuka clasped her hands behind her back, the picture of innocent curiosity. "A girl as pretty as you must've had suitors lined up out the door."
Jeanne laughed, soft and unbothered. "When I was younger I did like any girl from the village." She smiled at some private memory. "But when I had become the age to take it seriously God had already claimed my attention, you understand. There was no room for a husband."
"Sure, sure. But things are different now, right? You're here, you've got a whole new life. New chances." Ritsuka tilted her head. "You should keep your options open. There's some real quality people around, if you look."
She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. At Griswald.
Griswald felt the heat crawl up his neck and pool in his ears. He mouthed stop it at the back of her head with as much force as he could put into silence.
She did not stop it.
"Griswald, for instance," Ritsuka went on. "Kind. Smart. Great with his hands, I hear. Steady sort of guy. The kind you could really rely on, you know?" She let the words hang, ripe and loaded. "You should get to know him better. Really get to know him."
Jeanne considered this with complete, disarming sincerity, glancing back at Griswald as though genuinely weighing his merits as a companion.
"He does seem very kind," she agreed. "He treated those wounded men with great gentleness." Her smile turned warm. "I think we shall be good friends, the four of us."
"Friends," Ritsuka repeated, deadpan. "Right. Baby steps."
She was too naive to catch it. Every barbed implication sailed straight past her, and Griswald understood with a fresh wave of mortification that Jeanne had heard exactly none of what Ritsuka meant and all of what she'd literally said. Which somehow made it worse.
He stared at the road and willed the earth to swallow him. Mash had gone very carefully expressionless beside him, though the tips of her ears had turned pink.
Please, Griswald thought, to no one, to the trees, to whatever might be listening. Anything. Any interruption at all. I'll take a wyvern. I'll take two.
The communicator crackled in his ear.
"Griswald." Da Vinci's voice, clipped and sharp, all the teasing warmth gone out of it. "We've got a hit."
He stopped walking. Something in his posture must have changed, because the others turned at once, the joke evaporating in an instant.
"Talk to me," he said quietly.
"Servant signatures. Strong ones." A pause, the tap of Da Vinci's fingers over a console somewhere impossibly far away. "It flickered on maybe ninety seconds ago, southeast of your position. Close. Half a mile, no more. It's stationary."
"Corrupted?" Griswald asked.
"Can't tell from here. The reading's clean, which either means it's a proper Heroic Spirit or it means something's masking it well enough to worry me." Da Vinci's tone left no doubt which possibility she favored. "Romani's trying to sharpen the resolution but the ring's throwing interference across half the spectrum. I can only give you a direction."
Griswald met Jeanne's eyes. She had already gone still and cold, the pilgrim's warmth folded away, one hand tightening on the shaft of her banner. Beside him Mash's shield was into her grip in a single fluid motion, Fou springing clear of it to land soft-footed in the grass.
"Southeast," Griswald said. "Half a mile."
"Friend or enemy?" Mash asked.
"Unknown." He drew a slow breath. The green peace of the road felt suddenly thin, like paper stretched over something with teeth. "Da Vinci, keep talking to me. If it moves, I want to know before it finishes moving."
"Understood. Be careful, pupil. If it's the false Jeanne's, they'll have felt you the moment you feel them."
Jeanne stepped past him, banner leveled, eyes fixed on the trees to the southeast. "Then we don't give them time to decide first," she said. "Stay behind me. All of you."
They left the road, the forest closed green and silent around them.
As they ran Griswald's lungs burned within the first quarter-mile, his lanky frame never built for this, but he clenched his teeth and matched the pace as best he could. Mash slowed a half-step whenever she noticed him falling behind, and he waved her forward each time, refusing to be the anchor that dragged them down. Jeanne moved like water through the trees, her banner tucked close, silver armor flashing between trunks. Ritsuka kept low and quick beside him. Fou streaked ahead in white-pink blurs, appearing on fallen logs, on low branches, always pointing them southeast.
The trees thinned. The ground rose, then dropped away, and the forest gave onto open land.
They came over the crest of the last hill and stopped.
Below them lay a town. Or what had been one.
"God in Heaven." Jeanne breathed.
It was gone. Not besieged, not fought over, but erased. Rooftops had collapsed into black ribcages of charred beam. Whole rows of houses stood as hollow shells, their doorways gaping onto ash, their windows blind. Smoke still rose in lazy grey threads from a hundred smoldering points, and the smell of it reached them on the wind, thick and greasy and wrong. A church tower at the town's heart had folded in on itself, its bell fallen and half-buried in rubble.
Griswald swallowed. His mouth had gone dry.
"When?" he managed.
"Recent." Da Vinci's voice was low in his ear. "The heat signatures are still fading. Hours, maybe less."
They descended into it because there was nothing else to do. The main street ran straight through the ruin, and their boots stirred ash with every step, kicking up soft grey clouds that clung to their legs. Griswald had braced himself for bodies. There were none. That was worse, somehow. The stillness of a place where people had lived and now there was only the tick of cooling timber and the hush of wind through broken walls.
A child's shoe lay in the road, scorched black, its buckle melted into a bright bead.
Mash stopped beside a well and stared down into it, her jaw tight. Ritsuka had gone pale, her usual brightness snuffed out entirely, one hand pressed over her mouth.
"There's no one," Ritsuka whispered. "There's no one at all."
Griswald had seen Fuyuki. He'd walked through a city of ruin. He thought that had prepared him. It hadn't.
But it was Jeanne who broke.
She had stopped in the center of the street, before the ruin of the church, and she was not moving. Her banner had lowered until its butt rested in the ash. Her shoulders trembled.
"These marks," she said. Her voice came out thin and cracked. She crouched, pressing two gauntleted fingers to a scorched wall, and when she lifted them they came away black. "Look at the stone. Look how it runs." Her breath hitched. "It burned hot. Hot enough to melt iron. Only one thing burns France like this now."
"Jeanne—" Griswald started.
"It was her." Jeanne stood slowly. Her face had gone white as bone beneath the silver, and her blue eyes glistened. "She stood here and she did this." She turned in a slow circle, taking in the hollowed houses, the fallen tower, the tiny melted buckle of a child's shoe. "I have wondered, since I woke. I have prayed on it every night. What could she be, that carries my name. I told myself she was a stranger. A demon wearing my skin, nothing of me in her at all."
Her hand rose to her chest, over the breastplate, over her heart.
"But she is me. She came from the same flames I burned in. And I look at this and I think—" Her voice broke fully now, a single tear cutting a clean line through the ash on her cheek. "I think, if I had let myself hate them. If, at Rouen, when they lit the wood, I had let one moment of anger in instead of prayer—would I have done this? Is this what was always waiting inside me, if I had only—"
"No," Griswald said. He didn't think about it. He crossed to her through the ash and stopped an arm's length away, and he said it again, steadier. "No. That's not you. That's not what's inside you. I don't know much, Jeanne, but I know that isn't the same as this."
She looked at him. She wanted to believe it. He could see that she wanted to.
"Griswald." Da Vinci's voice cracked sharp across the comm, and the tone alone straightened his spine. "The signatures. They're on top of you. Now."
He spun.
At the far end of the ruined street, where the smoke drew a grey curtain across the world, two figures stepped through.
The smoke parted, and Griswald's hand fell to nothing, because he had no weapon and never had.
The first figure through the curtain moved with a rolling, unhurried grace, boots crunching ash without care for the silence around them. A woman, tall and slender, robed in white and pale blue that should have been immaculate and somehow was despite the ruin all around. Deep indigo hair fell straight past her waist, and a white veil framed a face too gentle for this place, all soft symmetry and large violet-blue eyes. A gold circlet caught what little light bled through the smoke. She carried a tall staff crowned with a cross, and she looked at the four of them with an expression of open, almost maternal concern, the way a woman might look at children caught out too far from home.
Behind her came the second, and Griswald's eye snagged and could not decide.
Slim. Younger, or seeming so. A long teal coat with split tails and pale gold trim, a white cravat tied neat at the throat, a rapier hanging light at one hip. Pale golden hair cut to the jaw, long bangs sweeping across one eye. The face beneath was refined to the point of confusion, delicate at the chin, fine at the nose, and Griswald genuinely could not have said whether he was looking at a young man or a young woman. Blue eyes, cool and unreadable, watched them from beneath the brim of a feathered cavalier's hat. Where the first woman's face was all warmth, this one gave nothing at all, a duelist's stillness, weight balanced and ready.
Neither of them looked corrupted. That was the trouble. There were no black veins, no swollen mana, no golden madness in the eyes. They simply stood there in a murdered town, clean and calm, and that was somehow worse than any monster.
"Stay back," Jeanne said, and stepped in front of Griswald, her tears gone hard, her banner rising level. Mash flowed up beside her, shield squaring, Fou bristling at her heel with faint light crackling along his fur. Ritsuka drifted a pace behind, tense.
"Who are you?" Griswald called, and hated how thin his voice came out across the ash. He steadied it, forced it lower. "Did you do this? This town, the people. Was this you?"
The woman in white raised both hands, palms out, the staff cradled in the crook of her arm. Not surrender. Something gentler, an easing gesture, the kind you'd use to calm a spooked animal.
"Peace, peace," she said, and her voice was warm as bread. "Look at how you're all trembling. Put the shield down, little one, before someone gets hurt over a misunderstanding." Her eyes moved over them, lingering on Mash, on Jeanne, and something in them softened further. "You've had a hard road, I can see it. All of you. There now."
"That isn't an answer," Mash said. Her shield did not drop.
"No, I suppose it isn't." The woman's mouth curved, rueful. "Names, then. You want names. I understand." She tilted her head. "You may call us by our classes, if that's easier for everyone. I'm the Rider-B." She gestured to the slim figure at her side, who had not moved and had not spoken. "And this one is the Saber-B. That will do for now."
The Saber inclined their head a bare inch. They said nothing. They only watched, one gloved hand resting light on the pommel of the rapier, weight settled, and Griswald understood that the silence was not shyness.
"Rider-B," Griswald repeated. His pulse hammered. "Saber-B. Now answer me." He made himself look at the ruin, the tower, the little melted buckle in the road, and then back at her warm, sorrowful face. "Did you burn this town?"
Something crossed the Rider's expression.
"We did not," she said, and there was iron under the warmth now, the first hint of it. "I want you to hear that clearly, because it matters. Neither of us laid a hand on these people." Her jaw tightened. "But I won't lie to you and say we had nothing to do with it, either. We were sent here. We arrived after. Our—" she paused on the word like it fouled her tongue— "our commander did this. Not us."
The bottom dropped out of Griswald's stomach.
Beside him he felt Jeanne go rigid, felt the change ripple through the whole group at once. Mash's shield came up another inch. Ritsuka sucked in a breath. Even Fou went low and flat, ears pinned.
"Your commander," Griswald said slowly. The pieces were snapping together and he did not like the shape they made. "Sent you. Here." His mouth had gone dry again. "Who do you serve?"
The Rider met his eyes and did not flinch from the question, and that steadiness frightened him more than any lie would have.
Jeanne answered before the woman could. Her voice came out low and terrible, stripped of all its earlier warmth, the banner trembling in her grip.
"You work for her," Jeanne said. "The one who wears my face. The witch of the fire." She took a step forward through the ash, and Griswald had never heard her sound like this, hollow and burning at once. "You serve the false Jeanne."
The Saber's hand closed fully around the rapier's hilt.
The Rider's face didn't change, but her staff shifted, the cross-crowned head dipping a fraction toward the earth, and the warmth in her went cool and grave as a closing door.
The Rider held Jeanne's gaze for a long moment before she answered, and when she spoke it was slow, careful, the way a woman picks her way across a river on uncertain stones.
"Fake," she repeated. She turned the word over. A small, sad shake of her head set the veil swaying. "I don't know that I would call her that, child. I'm not sure she is."
"Do not," Jeanne said, and her voice cracked like a whip across the ash. "Do not stand in the ruin of these people and tell me she is real. She is a corpse. A thing pulled out of the flames wearing my skin. There is nothing of me in her."
"Perhaps." The Rider's eyes were terribly gentle. "Or perhaps she is exactly you, only the part you never let breathe."
"Stop." Jeanne's knuckles had gone white on the banner's shaft. Tears stood bright in her eyes again, but her jaw was iron. "You do not get to tell me what I am."
Griswald stepped up beside her before he'd decided to. His legs felt like water and his heart battered his ribs, but he'd learned in Fuyuki that hesitation got people killed, and he'd be damned if he'd let Jeanne stand out here alone.
"That's enough philosophy," he said, and was surprised his voice held. "Whatever she is, real or not, you just told us who she is to you. So say it plainly, so there's no mistaking it." He forced himself to meet the Rider's warm, grave face and hold it. "Are you hers? Do you serve the one who burned this town?"
The Rider did not look away from him. She let the question settle, let the weight of it press down on all of them, and then she answered without flinch or shame.
"We are her Servants," she said. "Yes. She summoned us. We answer to her command."
The words landed like a struck bell, and everything after them rang.
Mash's shield came full up in a single hard motion, a wall of metal between the strangers and Griswald's chest.
Jeanne's banner leveled. Her whole frame had gone still and cold, the grief pressed down beneath something harder.
"Then we are enemies," she said. "Whatever you feel about her. Whatever grief you've imagined in a monster. You raised no hand for these people, you said. You stood here while she killed them, and you serve her still."
The Rider's shoulders fell, a small, weary drop.
"You think I take pleasure in this," she said. "Standing here. Answering to her." She shook her head, slow, the veil stirring against her cheek. "I don't. I want you to understand that, even if you never believe another word out of my mouth. There is nothing about this that I find pleasant. Nothing at all." Her violet-blue eyes swept the hollowed street, the fallen tower, the smoke rising in its lazy threads. "But she is our Master. She holds the command. And a Servant answers the command she is given, whether she likes the taste of it or not."
"That doesn't excuse it," Jeanne said. Her voice had gone very quiet, which was somehow worse than the shout. Her banner did not waver. "Your part in this. You stand there and tell me your hands are clean because you didn't strike the match. But you came after. You looked at all of it, and you stayed at her side. That is a choice, Rider-B. That is your choice, and no command washes it off you."
The Rider was silent for a moment. Then she nodded, once, without argument.
"You're right," she said. "It doesn't excuse it. I won't pretend it does." She lifted her staff a fraction, tilting the cross toward the ruin around them. "But talking about it will heal nothing here, will it? The words don't put a single roof back up. They don't call one soul home." Her mouth thinned. "The wyverns did their work. And we did ours. That is the shape of it now, whatever either of us wishes."
"What work?" Ritsuka's voice cut in from behind Griswald's shoulder, sharp and quick. She'd shaken off the ashen numbness; her eyes darted between the two figures, calculating. "You keep saying that. Your job. What is it you're actually here to do?"
For a long beat there was only the tick of cooling timber and the hush of wind.
Then the Saber moved.
The slim figure lifted their head at last, the long golden bangs shifting to reveal both cool blue eyes, and when they spoke the voice was low and clear.
"We are here to keep her in place," the Saber said.
The pale eyes moved, deliberate, and settled on Jeanne.
Griswald's blood ran cold.
Keep her in place. Not kill. Which meant the timing of all this, two Servants planted in a burning town precisely where Jeanne would come running, wasn't chance at all. It had been set out like bait on a line, and they had walked straight down the throat of it, marveling at flowers the whole way.
His mouth opened. Before a word left it, Romani's voice detonated across the comm, so loud it made him flinch.
"Griswald—third signature! Third one, coming in fast from the north, it just lit up like a bonfire and it's closing hard!" A scramble of noise, Da Vinci's voice underneath, clipped and urgent. "It wasn't there ten seconds ago, it's moving faster than anything should—Griswald, this is not two Servants, this was never two—"
The realization hit him all at once.
"It's a trap," Griswald said, and heard his own voice come out flat and certain in a way it never did. He grabbed Jeanne's shoulder, grabbed for Mash. "We have to go. Now. Back to the treeline, we retreat, we do not fight three of them in the open—Mash, move, everyone move—"
He was already turning, already dragging at Jeanne's arm, his eyes flicking to the ruined street behind them, the alley mouth between two hollowed houses, the slope up to the trees where they'd come from. That way. Fastest. Fou was already streaking toward it, a white blur low across the ash.
But the Rider was faster.
She simply stepped, and where she stepped she was, no longer at the far end of the street but sliding between them and the alley mouth with that same rolling, unhurried grace, staff planted, cross-crowned head glinting. Her warm face had not hardened, but her body filled the gap like a wall.
"I'm sorry," she said, and she sounded like she meant it. "I truly am. But I can't let you leave."
Griswald wheeled the other way, toward the church, toward the second gap where the tower had spilled its stone into the road, and there the Saber was already, having crossed the distance in the space of a heartbeat without seeming to hurry at all. The rapier slid free of its sheath with a whisper of steel, its point drifting up to rest, light as a held breath, aimed at the empty air between them.
"That path is closed," the Saber said. "As is every other. Please don't make me chase you. It's undignified for all involved."
Boxed. Front and back, both routes stoppered by a Servant apiece, and a third barreling down from the north like a comet. Mash pressed her shield out, Jeanne's banner swept up, and Ritsuka's breath came fast. Griswald stood in the center of a murdered town with ash on his boots and his heart slamming against his ribs, and understood that the choice to run had never been theirs to make.
Griswald's eyes raked the ruin for anything, any seam in the box. A collapsed wall he could scramble over. A gap in the smoke where they might scatter and regroup. His mind clawed through options the way it always did, faster than his mouth, faster than his hands, cataloguing the church rubble, the well, the black skeletons of houses, searching for the one variable the Rider and the Saber hadn't accounted for.
There wasn't one. He knew it even as he looked. Two Servants, both faster than thought, both positioned with a care that made his skin crawl. And still he looked, because looking was the only thing he had that might keep them alive.
He never got the chance to finish.
The light overhead changed.
It came the way a storm comes, all at once, the smoke pressed flat and the ash lifting off the street in a great grey exhalation as something enormous dropped out of the sky above the town. Griswald's head snapped up. His first thought was wyvern, and his second thought threw the first away, because this was no wyvern. The wyverns had been the size of horses, ugly leathery things. This filled the sky.
This was a dragon.
It was vast beyond any sense of scale the ruined rooftops could give it, its wingspan blotting out the pale ring in the heavens as it banked low over the town. Scales the deep, wet green of moss on old stone sheathed its long body, each one edged in a darker jade that caught the smoke-light and threw it back in oily glints. A serpentine neck coiled and uncoiled as it turned, crowned by a narrow wedge of a skull studded with backswept horns the color of old bone. Its eyes burned a sickly amber. Twin rows of jagged spines ran the length of its spine down to a whip-thin tail, and where its claws raked the air Griswald could see they were each longer than Mash's shield. The downdraft of its wings flattened the smoke and stirred a howl of hot wind through the hollow houses, kicking up a blizzard of ash that stung his eyes and clogged his throat.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Ritsuka snarled, and it was the first real curse he'd heard out of her, raw and disbelieving. "That's… Griswald, that's a whole dragon—"
The beast dipped lower, close enough that Griswald could feel the furnace-heat rolling off its scaled belly, and something detached from its back.
A figure fell. It dropped through the churning ash with its arms loose and a black cloak snapping behind it like a torn flag, and it struck the ruined street in a crouch that sent a ring of grey dust blasting outward across the road. The impact should have shattered a mortal's legs. This figure simply rose out of it, unhurried, brushing ash from a gauntleted forearm.
"Well, well," it said. "So the little rat found her way to the party after all."
The voice cut through the ringing air, harsh and mocking, dripping contempt.
And every one of them froze.
Not from the words. Griswald barely registered the words at first. It was the sound of them. The pitch, the timbre, the exact shape of the vowels. He had walked all day beside that voice. He had heard it break with grief not ten minutes ago.
It was Jeanne's voice, perfectly, down to the smallest inflection, and hearing it pour out cruelty made something in Griswald's chest twist sideways.
He turned his head slowly. Beside him, the real Jeanne had gone white as death, her banner lowered, her lips parted, staring at the figure in the road as though the earth had opened beneath her.
The new arrival straightened to her full height, and the ash settled around her boots.
She wore black armor, fitted close and sleek to a tall, lean frame, layered plates riding her shoulders and forearms and torso without a wasted line. A thick black fur mantle draped her shoulders, and from it fell a long cloak lined in vivid, bloody crimson, its tattered lower edge that seemed almost to flicker in the smoke-light. Dark belts and straps crossed her waist, accented in dull purple, cinching the armored panels tight. One side of her lower body was sheathed in a long armored skirt-plate; the other left a pale thigh bare above black stockings that ran down into reinforced boots.
But it was the face that stopped Griswald's breath.
It was Jeanne's face. The same fine, heart-shaped contour, the same small pointed chin, the same porcelain-pale skin. But everything soft in the pilgrim had been drawn sharp here, refined into something imperious and cold. The hair was cut short and asymmetrical, platinum blonde long uneven bangs framing the sculpted face. A black horn-like piece of armor curved around one temple. And where the true Jeanne's eyes were a clear and gentle blue, these burned a hard golden-yellow, narrow-pupiled, framed by pale lashes, and they found the woman in silver across the street and sharpened with something like delight.
To see them together in the ruined street was obscene. The same woman twice, one a prayer and one a flame, staring at each other across a town they had both wept over and burned.
The black armored Jeanne, tilted her head, and her mouth curled.
"Look at you," she said, and each word landed like a slap. "Standing there in your pretty silver, clutching your little banner, weeping over ash. God, it's pathetic." She spread her arms, taking in the hollowed houses, the fallen tower, the whole murdered town, and her smile widened. "Do you like what I made of France?"
Jeanne said nothing.
She stood in the ash with her banner lowered, her face upturned to the black-armored thing that wore her skin, and she offered no answer to the taunt. No flinch, no retort, not even the tremble Griswald had watched break her open only minutes before. She simply looked, blue eyes fixed on gold, and let the cruelty wash over her without purchase.
The Alter's smile faltered by a fraction.
"Nothing to say?" She prowled a step closer through the ruin, boots crunching, cloak dragging a smear through the grey. "Come now. Where's all that righteous fire? You had plenty of it for the child king you crowned but now you are silent." Her golden eyes narrowed. "I burned your countrymen. I put the torch to their children while they screamed. And you stand there like a cow chewing grass."
Jeanne looked at her.
"Say something." The word cracked out, harder now, the mockery thinning at the edges into genuine irritation. "Don't just stand there doing nothing. I did not come all the way out here just for you to be still. Come on I want to enjoy killing yo —"
"How could you do this."
Jeanne's voice was very quiet, and it cut straight through the taunt.
The Alter stopped.
"How could you do this," Jeanne said again, and now she took a step forward, banner rising, her upturned face gone pale and stricken and searching. "This is our home. These were our people. The land that raised us, the land we bled for. I gave my life for them. I stood in the fire and I forgave them, all of them, every soul who lit the wood." Her voice shook, not with fear but with something rawer. "How can you be me and do this to them?"
For a heartbeat something crossed the Alter's features. Not remorse. Something colder and more bitter, a flicker like heat-shimmer over the sculpted planes of her face.
Then she laughed.
"You want to know?" She spread her arms again, the crimson-lined cloak flaring. "You truly want the answer? Then why don't you ask Him." She spat the word. "Your precious Lord. Your God. He was always so chatty with you, wasn't He? Whispering in your ear, filling your head with holy nonsense, telling you which way to march and which king to crown." Her lip curled, ugly and knowing. "Go on. Kneel down in the ash and pray. Ask Him why France burns. See what answer He gives you now."
Jeanne's jaw tightened.
"Oh, but wait." The Alter tilted her head, golden eyes glittering with malice, and her voice dropped into something soft and vicious and intimate, the cruelty of someone who knew exactly where to press. "Do you still hear Him? The voices, the whispers, all that comfort in the dark?" She smiled slow. "Or has He gone quiet? Has He left you standing here alone at last, with no one murmuring in your ear, wondering if He was ever there at all? Tell me, my old naive self. Do you still hear the voices?"
"Stop."
The word came out of Jeanne flat and final, stripped of everything soft.
The Alter's smile spread wide.
"There she is," she breathed. "That's better." She rolled her shoulders, and the whole lean length of her seemed to settle into something eager, something hungry, the sport gone out of her voice and the appetite come in. "Fine. Enough talk. I'll not waste more breath on a corpse that hasn't figured out it's dead."
She raised one gauntleted hand and snapped her fingers, the sound impossibly loud in the ruin.
"Rider. Saber." Her eyes never left Jeanne. "Kill them. But I will take the false saint."
Griswald's stomach dropped through the ash-strewn earth.
Behind them the Rider-B's staff came level, the warmth in her draining out of her face like water through cracked stone, leaving only grave, sorrowful purpose. Before them the Saber-B's rapier lifted, weight settling forward onto the balls of their feet, the cool blue eyes going flat and lethal. The dragon overhead let out a shriek that shook loose fresh ash from the hollowed rooftops, banking around for another pass, its amber eyes burning down at them.
They were boxed. Two Servants at their flanks, a dragon and its rider ahead, and no seam anywhere for his frantic mind to find.
"Get ready!" Griswald's voice tore out of him. He grabbed for Ritsuka, hauled her in close against his shoulder, put his own body between her and the open street the way he'd learned to in Fuyuki even knowing his flesh would stop nothing. "Mash—Mash—"
"On it, Master."
She was already moving. The great cross-shaped shield swept up and around in one fluid arc, and Mash planted herself with her boots wide in the ash, angling the wall of metal to cover the widest wedge she could, Griswald and Ritsuka tucked behind its edge. Fou darted to her heel, fur bristling with faint blue light, ears flat, teeth bared at the sky.
"Rider on our six, Saber on our twelve," Mash reported, clipped and steady, her voice gone into the cool competence that only ever surfaced in battle. "I can't cover both. Senpai, stay in the pocket. Whichever comes first, I turn to it—do not step out from the shield, whatever happens."
"Understood." His heart hammered so hard it hurt.
"Griswald." Da Vinci's voice, tight in his ear. "All three signatures are combat-active. The dragon reads off the scale, I have never seen a mana profile like it—do not let that thing breathe on you, do you hear me? Whatever it exhales, the shield may not hold it."
He heard. He didn't answer. There was no breath left for it.
And through all of it, Jeanne had not moved.
She stood alone before the shield, banner in hand, silver armor grey with ash, and she had not looked away from the black-clad figure in the road. The Rider gathered herself. The Saber shifted its weight. The dragon screamed and dove.
But Jeanne d'Arc only gazed up at her dark reflection, her face full of a grief too vast to name, as though the whole burning world had narrowed to the single terrible question of how the thing wearing her face could possibly, possibly be her.