"That idiot. That absolute, sword-brained idiot."
Vivian sat curled up inside a shipping warehouse, knees pulled to her chest, back pressed against a stack of crates, her expression cycling through emotions like a slot machine that couldn't pick a winner.
Thirty percent resentment. Forty percent residual terror. Fifty percent helpless adoration. Zero percent math.
"The second there's a fight, he forgets I exist. Just — poof. Gone. Off to swing his sword at the pretty spear man. And what about me? What about the woman he's supposed to be protecting?"
She hugged her knees tighter and muttered darkly into the fabric of her pants.
In fairness, her current situation wasn't entirely the Swordsman's fault. He'd tried to protect her — in the sense that he'd hurled her like a football into a tree before charging off to fight Lancer. The Command Spell she'd burned to yank him out of the fight had saved his life, but it had also dropped him somewhere on the other side of the dock district, leaving Vivian alone and injured in a warehouse full of cardboard boxes and regret.
She'd climbed down from the tree — barely — and found the nearest unlocked warehouse to hide in. Locked the door behind her. Pressed herself into the darkest corner she could find. Standard survival protocol.
But her heart was still hammering. Her legs were shaking. And every time she closed her eyes, she relived the sensation of being thrown — the world spinning, the ground disappearing, the horrifying moment of weightlessness before the branches caught her.
She'd been a white-collar office worker before all this. Desk job. Spreadsheets. The most dangerous thing in her daily life was the passive-aggressive emails from accounting. She was not built for interdimensional death matches.
And yet, despite everything — despite the terror, the bruises, and the very real possibility of dying in a warehouse that smelled like cardboard and diesel — a flush of pink crept across her cheeks when she thought about the Swordsman.
The way he'd moved. The way his blade caught the light. The way he'd thrown her with one arm like she weighed nothing—
Vivian shook her head violently. Focus. You're in a warzone. Stop being a disaster.
But she couldn't help it. Because here was the thing about Vivian — the thing that made her dangerous and stupid in roughly equal measure: she wasn't dumb. Not really. She could read situations. She could make plans. She'd recognized instantly that Lancer's open challenge was a trap designed to draw out opponents, and she'd come up with a solid counter-strategy.
The problem was that all of her intelligence existed in a completely separate compartment from her emotions. And the emotional compartment? That one was currently running a highlight reel of the Swordsman looking cool while covered in blood.
More critically, Vivian didn't know history.
This was a bigger problem than it sounded. In a Holy Grail War, knowledge was power — literally. Knowing which Heroic Spirit you'd summoned, understanding their legend, their strengths, their weaknesses — that was the foundation of every winning strategy.
And Vivian had none of it.
When the Swordsman had introduced himself — "Saber, Hajime Saito. Captain of the Third Division of the Shinsengumi. The Invincible Sword" — Vivian had retained approximately three words of that sentence.
"Saber." Cool.
"Invincible." Very cool.
"Sword." Obviously.
Everything else had gone in one ear and straight out the other, replaced by the image of a handsome man in a rumpled suit holding a glowing katana.
She didn't know who Hajime Saito was. She didn't know what the Shinsengumi were. She didn't know whether "Captain of the Third Division" meant he was a legendary warrior or a middle manager with a weapon.
All she knew was that he'd shown her his Noble Phantasm — Formless — and it had looked incredible. A technique that used impossible footwork to distort the opponent's perception of distance and time, closing in for a single, devastating killing strike before the enemy even realized he'd moved.
One-hit kill. Clean. Elegant. Terrifying.
Vivian had watched the demonstration with stars in her eyes and a single word burning in her heart: WIN.
Her Saber was invincible. Obviously. The name said so. End of analysis.
She was, in this specific regard, making exactly the same mistake as Crystal. But where Crystal was delusional out of romance-novel fantasy, Vivian was delusional out of pure, blissful ignorance.
The universe was about to correct that.
Vivian was deep in a fantasy — imagining Saber appearing through the warehouse door like a hero descending from the clouds, sweeping her into his arms, carrying her to safety while dramatic music played — when she heard it.
A sound.
Faint. Almost nothing. The softest whisper of displaced air, like fabric brushing against fabric, or a footstep that had been deliberately, meticulously silenced.
If the warehouse hadn't been dead silent — if Vivian's own breathing hadn't been the only sound in the entire building — she would have missed it entirely.
But she didn't miss it.
And every hair on her body stood straight up.
Did I imagine that?
She held her breath. Listened. The darkness pressed in around her, heavy and absolute. The warehouse door was locked. She'd checked it twice. Even if someone was out there, they'd have to break through — and that would make noise. A lot of noise.
Unless—
Her blood turned to ice.
Assassin.
The word hit her like a slap. Assassin-class Servants had Presence Concealment — the ability to erase their existence entirely. No sound. No presence. No magical signature. They could walk through locked doors, slip past barriers, materialize from nothing.
A locked door meant nothing to an Assassin.
Vivian's heart rate spiked so hard she felt it in her teeth. The darkness of the warehouse, which had felt protective a moment ago, suddenly felt like a coffin.
Move. Move move move—
The throwing knife came from directly in front of her.
No warning. No sound. Just a whisper of displaced air and a blur of silver in the darkness, aimed straight at her center mass.
Vivian's body moved before her brain finished processing. Some primal, animal part of her — the part that had survived a million years of evolution by running from things with sharp teeth — screamed at her to dodge, and she threw herself sideways in a desperate roll.
SLASH!
The blade missed her torso. It did not miss her leg.
A line of fire opened across her calf — shallow enough to not hit bone, deep enough to make her scream. Blood bloomed through her torn pant leg, hot and wet against the cold air.
Vivian crashed into a pile of cardboard boxes, gasping, blinking, trying to see through the pain and the darkness.
And there, standing where she'd been sitting a heartbeat ago, was a figure.
Tall. Dark. Lean. Draped in shadow like it was clothing. And on its face — a white skull mask, smooth and expressionless, with empty eyes that seemed to drink in the darkness around them.
Hassan of the Hundred Faces.
Vivian's mind went blank.
Complete whiteout. Every thought, every plan, every survival instinct — all of it crashed at once, replaced by a silence so absolute it was almost peaceful. She lay among the scattered boxes, blood pooling under her leg, and stared at the masked figure with the numb incomprehension of someone who had just realized, with perfect clarity, that they were about to die.
The cold sweat came a second later. Pouring down her spine, soaking through her shirt, dripping from her jaw. Her body was screaming at her to run, to fight, to do something, but her muscles had locked up like they'd been dipped in concrete.
Hassan tilted his head. A sound escaped from behind the mask — low, rhythmic, grating. Like rusted hinges being slowly worked back and forth.
He was laughing.
Then, with the casual precision of someone threading a needle, he flicked a throwing knife into Vivian's shoulder.
The pain was extraordinary.
Not clean, like the cut on her leg. This was a burrowing, invasive agony — the blade sinking into muscle, scraping against something it shouldn't have, sending electric shocks down her arm and across her chest. Vivian's scream ripped out of her before she could stop it, raw and ragged, bouncing off the warehouse walls.
Her vision blurred. Went white. Came back in fractured pieces.
And through the haze, she saw Hassan wind up again.
The next knife hit her other calf.
She screamed again. Couldn't help it. The pain was building — each wound layering on the last, compounding, the individual agonies blending into a single, overwhelming wave that threatened to drag her under.
And that's when she understood.
He wasn't trying to kill her quickly.
The throws were precise. Deliberate. Aimed at extremities — calves, shoulders, places that would cripple and immobilize without causing fatal blood loss. He was pinning her down. Taking her apart piece by piece, like a collector mounting a butterfly.
If she let this continue — if she fell completely into his hands — what came next would be worse than death.
Something snapped.
Deep inside Vivian, in a place she didn't know existed until that exact moment, something ancient and stubborn and furious woke up and slammed its fist on the table.
No.
I am not dying like this. Not in a cardboard warehouse. Not to a guy in a Halloween mask.
Hassan drew another knife.
Vivian grabbed a cardboard box.
"Guh—?"
She threw it.
Not gracefully. Not skillfully. She grabbed the nearest box — a big one, sturdy, probably full of packing peanuts — and hurled it at the Assassin with every ounce of adrenaline-fueled strength in her wounded body.
Hassan, who had clearly not expected his bleeding, pinned-down, thoroughly terrorized prey to fight back, caught the box directly in the face.
It was a big box.
It got stuck.
For one beautiful, absurd, utterly surreal moment, Hassan of the Hundred Faces — legendary assassin, fragment of the Old Man of the Mountain, terror of the Holy Grail War — stood in the middle of a dark warehouse with a cardboard box jammed over his skull mask, arms flailing, making muffled sounds of confused outrage.
Vivian didn't waste the moment.
She pushed herself backward on her elbows, leaving a trail of blood on the concrete floor, her ruined legs dragging behind her. Every movement was agony. Every inch felt like a mile. But she kept moving, kept pulling herself away, until her back hit the far wall and she couldn't retreat any further.
Then she raised her right hand.
The crimson marks on the back of her hand — the Command Spells — pulsed with light. Bright, seductive, the color of arterial blood.
"Come to my side—"
Hassan ripped the box free and lunged.
"SABER!"
The Command Spell detonated.
A pillar of blue magical energy erupted from the marks on Vivian's hand, punching through the warehouse ceiling and into the sky like a signal flare. Across the dock district, two miles away, the Swordsman — Hajime Saito — felt the pull hit him like a freight train.
Reality folded.
One instant he was standing on a ruined pier, katana raised, the afterimage of Lancer's spears still burning in his vision. The next instant the world blurred, space compressed, and he was somewhere else entirely — his boots slamming into concrete, his blade still in his hand, his body still humming with the momentum of a fight that had ended mid-heartbeat.
He landed in a dark warehouse. Confused. Disoriented. The transition had been instant — no warning, no travel time, just here to there in the space between thoughts.
Then his eyes adjusted.
And the confusion became something else entirely.
Vivian was on the ground. Bleeding from three separate wounds — both calves, one shoulder. Pale. Shaking. Her eyes wide and wet and locked onto him with an expression that was equal parts relief and terror.
And standing between them — skull mask askew, throwing knife still raised, frozen in mid-lunge — was Hassan of the Hundred Faces.
Saito's grip tightened on his katana.
The confusion vanished. The disorientation vanished. Even the lingering adrenaline from the fight with Lancer vanished, replaced by something purer and infinitely more dangerous.
Rage.
Cold, surgical, absolute rage.
His Master was annoying. She was clingy, emotional, irrational, and she'd burned a Command Spell to pull him out of the best fight he'd had since the Bakumatsu.
But she was his Master. His charge. The person he'd sworn to protect.
And someone had hurt her. Had tortured her. Had pinned her to the ground with throwing knives and laughed about it.
"Master," Saito said, and his voice was so quiet it barely carried across the warehouse. "What happened?"
"He — the knives — I couldn't—"
"I understand."
He turned to face Hassan.
The Assassin had recovered from his surprise. He stood in the center of the warehouse in a low combat stance, daggers in both hands, skull mask tilted at an angle that somehow conveyed feral amusement even without a visible expression.
He was not afraid. Assassins were rarely afraid. Fear was a luxury for people who planned to be seen.
Saito was not interested in the Assassin's emotional state.
"You," he said, and there was nothing human in his voice anymore. Nothing warm, nothing tired, nothing wry. Just the flat, absolute finality of a death sentence being read aloud. "You dare lay hands on my Master? With such cowardly methods?"
Hassan's response was a burst of motion — a charge, low and fast, daggers aimed at Saito's throat in a classic double-thrust.
Saito's blade moved.
One swing.
The impact was titanic. The dagger shattered on contact with the katana's edge, and the force behind the blow launched Hassan backward like a comet — his body crashing through the warehouse wall in an explosion of brick, mortar, and splintered wood.
BOOM!
Dust billowed. Debris rained. The wall had a Hassan-shaped hole in it, and beyond it, the cold night air rushed in.
Saito didn't pause. Didn't hesitate. Didn't give the Assassin a single second to recover.
He followed through the hole like a ghost — silent, fluid, his katana held low, his eyes burning in the darkness.
"Guh—!"
"Die."
The word was simple. Final.
"Formless."
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