The moment the decision to fight had been made, the exhaustion vanished from the Swordsman's eyes like fog burned away by sunlight.
What replaced it was something sharper. Something older. The cold, predatory focus of a man who had spent his entire life — and apparently his entire afterlife — behind the edge of a blade.
Lancer saw the shift. Recognized it. And grinned.
There was a warrior.
They faced each other across the wreckage of the shattered warehouse, the cold sea wind whipping between them, moonlight glinting off steel. Neither moved. Neither blinked. The silence stretched like a wire pulled taut, vibrating with potential energy, and in that silence the real battle had already begun — the invisible war of assessment, calculation, and intent that happened before the first blow was ever thrown.
The Swordsman's eyes moved methodically across Lancer's stance. Two spears. Long and short. Both wrapped in strips of runic cloth that pulsed faintly with power.
Which one is the Noble Phantasm?
The long spear? The short spear? Both?
It was the classic dilemma — the same puzzle that had destroyed knights and heroes since the Age of Gods. Face an opponent with two weapons, and you couldn't commit to defending against either one without leaving yourself open to the other. It was a trap with no clean exit.
But the Swordsman didn't get much time to think about it.
Because Lancer moved first.
The long spear shot forward — not in a straight line, but in a serpentine arc, the rune-wrapped shaft bending and whipping like a living thing, the tip seeking flesh with the hungry precision of a viper's strike.
Fast.
The Swordsman didn't draw his blade. Not yet. Instead, he used the sword and its sheath together — wedging them like a clamp around the incoming spear shaft, catching the thrust mid-flight and wrenching it off course. The tip scraped past his shoulder, close enough to shave fabric, and in the same motion the Swordsman surged forward.
Three steps. That's all it took.
He closed the distance in an instant, eating up the space between them with explosive footwork. Because in a fight between spear and sword, the math was simple: at range, the spear wins. Always. The only chance a swordsman had was to get inside the spear's effective distance — close enough that the longer weapon became a liability instead of an advantage.
Get close. Stay close. Cut him down.
That was the plan.
But plans are only as good as the enemy allows them to be.
And Lancer had two spears.
The moment the Swordsman closed in — the moment his hand tightened on his hilt, ready to draw and slash in a single devastating motion — Lancer's left hand was already moving. The short spear shot from behind the long one like a hidden fang, a brilliant streak of runic light driving straight at the Swordsman's chest.
CLANG!
Metal screamed against metal. The Swordsman managed to get his blade between himself and the spear tip — barely — but the impact was monstrous. The force of the blow lifted him off his feet and hurled him backward, his boots carving grooves in the concrete before he skidded to a stop fifteen feet away.
When he looked up, blood was running down the right side of his face.
The short spear hadn't pierced him. But it had gotten close enough to slice a clean, shallow line across his cheek — a cut so precise it almost looked intentional. Decorative. Like Lancer had signed his work.
Blood welled up and spilled down the Swordsman's jaw in a warm, crimson sheet. Half his face was painted red, making him look less like a warrior and more like a mask from some ancient theater of war.
But instead of retreat—
Something woke up behind his eyes.
The weariness was gone. The reluctance was gone. That vaguely apologetic "I didn't mean to end up here" energy that had been clinging to him since he crashed through the warehouse walls? Gone. Burned away by the pain, replaced by something hotter and more dangerous.
Fervor.
The Swordsman's grip on his katana tightened until his knuckles went white. His stance shifted — lower, wider, more aggressive. The iridescent blade caught the moonlight and threw it back in fractured rainbows.
Lancer watched the transformation with a widening grin. He shifted his hips, resettled his stance, and brought both spears back to ready position — long and short, high and low, the classic dual-wield form that had killed more heroes than most Noble Phantasms.
"Alright then," Lancer murmured, his beauty mark catching a shadow as his smile sharpened. "Let's go."
The second exchange was faster, harder, and infinitely more violent.
Spear met sword met spear met sword — a whirlwind of strikes and counters that moved too fast for normal eyes to track. Each impact sent shockwaves rippling across the dock, cracking concrete and rattling the walls of every warehouse within a hundred feet. The sound of clashing metal rang out like a blacksmith's forge running at triple speed.
Lancer pressed the advantage. Two spears meant two angles of attack, and he used them in seamless combination — the long spear sweeping wide to force the Swordsman's guard open, the short spear stabbing through the gap a heartbeat later. It was a rhythm. A cadence. A two-part harmony written in blood and steel.
The Swordsman survived it through sheer skill — his footwork was extraordinary, his blade moving in tight, efficient arcs that wasted nothing, deflecting strikes by millimeters instead of inches, finding angles that shouldn't have existed between the twin spear tips.
But surviving wasn't winning. And both of them knew it.
"I'll admit," the Swordsman said between clashes, his voice steady despite the blood still running down his cheek, "I've never faced a dual-spear wielder before. I didn't expect the first one to be this much of a headache."
Lancer laughed — bright, genuine, delighted. The laugh of a man who lived for this and nothing else. "Your swordsmanship isn't bad either. That strike should've been a clean kill, but you found a way to slip past it."
"Those are some serious skills and footwork you've got. You're clearly no ordinary hero."
"And that katana — unmistakable. So tell me... which legendary swordsman of Japan are you?"
The Swordsman's lips twitched. Not quite a smile. "Which one? Couldn't say for certain."
A pause in the fighting. Both men held their ground, breathing hard, eyes locked.
"But I'll tell you this," the Swordsman continued. "You should get ready. I'm playing my trump card."
Lancer's eyes narrowed. His grin didn't fade — if anything, it got sharper. "Oh? A Noble Phantasm?"
"Who knows?"
Noble Phantasms.
The crystallization of heroic legend. The ultimate expression of a Servant's identity — their myth made manifest, their story compressed into a single weapon, a single technique, a single devastating act.
Some Noble Phantasms were objects: legendary swords, divine shields, enchanted chariots. Others were abilities: techniques so refined they'd transcended mortal limits and become something more. Something conceptual.
What the Swordsman was about to unleash fell into the second category. A Noble Phantasm born not from a weapon, but from a technique — a sword art so perfect that the Throne of Heroes had recognized it as a legend unto itself.
And he needed it. Badly.
Because the truth was brutal, and the Swordsman had accepted it over the course of the last two exchanges: he was outmatched.
Not just in skill — though Lancer's dual-spear style was terrifyingly polished — but in raw stats. The trembling in his fingers after blocking just two full-power strikes told the whole story. Lancer hit harder than he should have. Faster. The man's agility was off the charts, and his striking power wasn't far behind.
And the Swordsman wasn't weak. His own stats were balanced — solid across the board, no glaring weaknesses. The kind of Servant profile that should've been competitive against any opponent in a fair fight.
But Lancer wasn't just competitive. He was dominant. The gap in raw specs meant that Lancer's legend — whoever he truly was — was at least equal to the Swordsman's, probably greater. Add in the centuries of combat experience radiating from every movement, and the conclusion was clear.
A prolonged fight was a losing fight.
The only chance was a quick finish. One strike. One moment. Everything on the line.
So be it.
The Swordsman exhaled slowly. Then, in a single motion, he threw his scabbard aside. It clattered against the concrete and spun away into the shadows.
Both hands on the hilt. Blade raised high. The stance of a man committing everything to a single, irreversible action.
The air changed.
Killing intent flooded the dock — not the hot, reckless aggression of an amateur, but something colder. Denser. The focused, compressed lethality of a technique that had been practiced ten thousand times until it had stopped being human and started being divine.
Watching from behind the stacked shipping containers, Crystal's heart clenched.
She'd been narrating the entire fight in her head like a romance novel — the two warriors, fighting for her honor, their blades singing in the moonlight — but the killing intent cut through the fantasy like ice water.
This was real. One of them was about to die.
And Crystal discovered, somewhat to her own surprise, that she didn't want either of them to die.
Because yes, Lancer was her Servant. Her gorgeous, loyal, spear-wielding knight. But the Swordsman — that exhausted, bleeding, stubbornly beautiful man in the ruined suit — was also, objectively speaking, extremely attractive.
The blood on his face. The fire in his eyes. The way he moved like violence was a language he'd been born speaking.
Ugh. Crystal pressed her hands together. Please don't kill each other. Please. Can't handsome men just get along?
The universe, predictably, did not take her prayer into consideration.
Back on the battlefield, Lancer read the stance instantly.
Scabbard discarded. Two-handed grip. High guard. The Swordsman was going for a single, decisive thrust-slash — a downward strike designed to split him from crown to navel.
A thrusting cut from that distance? He'll have to close in again.
Lancer shifted his weight and settled into the optimal defensive posture. He wasn't worried. The dual spears were made for this. No matter how fast the opponent charged, the short spear would find his throat this time. Not his cheek. His throat.
And a Noble Phantasm? Please. Whatever technique this swordsman had refined into legend, it would have to get past two spears wielded by the Hound of Ireland — and nothing short of divine intervention was going to accomplish that.
He calculated the distance. Measured the timing. Set his killing blow.
Come.
The Swordsman came.
"Invisible—"
SLASH!
The sound that echoed across the docks wasn't steel on steel.
It was the wet, unmistakable sound of flesh being torn.
Lancer staggered backward, eyes wide, a spray of crimson arcing through the air from a wound that had opened across his chest — deep, diagonal, running from his left shoulder to his right hip.
Impossible.
He'd calculated the distance perfectly. The Swordsman had been too far. Three feet beyond the reach of his blade, at minimum. The strike shouldn't have connected — couldn't have connected — at that range.
And yet blood was pouring down his chest.
How? The distance... it was still too far—
"You dodged it?!"
The Swordsman's voice was sharp with frustration. He stood with his katana extended in the follow-through of his strike, the iridescent blade dripping crimson, his stance locked in the perfect geometry of a technique completed. A killing blow. Aimed at the throat.
Lancer had survived only because some primal instinct — something deeper than thought, deeper than calculation — had screamed at him to move at the last possible instant.
"Don't be too surprised," the Swordsman said, his tone somewhere between impressed and annoyed. "You've got the Eye of the Mind skill, right? Combat intuition honed by a lifetime of battle. That's the only thing that saved you."
Lancer pressed a hand to his chest wound. Blood seeped between his fingers. His grin — impossibly — was wider than ever.
"But that Noble Phantasm of yours... a technique sublimated into legend." He laughed through the pain, the sound half-admiration and half-disbelief. "It distorts perceived distance? You can make your opponent misjudge how far away you are?"
"Something like that."
"That's terrifying."
"It would've been more terrifying if it had actually killed you."
The wound on Lancer's chest was ugly, but not fatal. A few inches deeper and it would've ended things. But the short spear was already up, the long spear reset, and Lancer's eyes were blazing with the kind of intensity that only came from meeting a true equal.
"Well, well," Lancer murmured, blood still dripping from his chin. "I suppose I should take this more seriously."
The Swordsman flexed his grip on his katana. His face was still half-painted in his own blood, the wound on his cheek still seeping. Between the two of them, they looked like they'd walked out of a slaughterhouse.
"Listen," the Swordsman said flatly. "I failed to kill you with one strike, and now you know exactly what my Noble Phantasm does. All my cards are on the table. The element of surprise is gone."
"So?"
"So now you're going to say something about taking my head, and I'm going to have to fight you without my trump card."
Lancer's grin turned predatory. "Are you prepared to have your head taken by me?"
"Don't get cocky. You survived one sword strike. The next one won't miss."
Blood didn't make either of them flinch. If anything, it seemed to feed them — fueling the kind of battle-lust that separated Heroic Spirits from ordinary warriors. The brutality wasn't a deterrent. It was an invitation. A shared language. A bond forged in violence that both men understood on a level deeper than words.
The dock was a ruin. Warehouses shattered. Concrete cracked and cratered. Blood on the ground, blood in the air, the salt-wind carrying the copper scent of it across the harbor.
Two wounded Servants faced each other, neither willing to yield a single step.
And just as the third exchange was about to begin—
Just as Lancer's spears began to move and the Swordsman's blade caught the moonlight one final time—
The Swordsman vanished.
Not retreated. Not fled. Vanished. One frame he was there, the next he was gone — ripped from the battlefield as if an invisible hand had reached down and plucked him out of existence.
A Command Spell.
Vivian, watching from her tree, had used a Command Spell to forcibly teleport her Servant to safety.
The dock fell silent.
Lancer stood alone among the ruins, twin spears still raised, blood running down his chest and dripping from the tips of his weapons. He stared at the empty space where his opponent had been.
Then he lowered his spears.
And laughed.
Show Some By Powerstones
Next BONUS CHAPTER at 200 powerstones