〔 Notification: Your Servant has killed Player — Vivian. 〕
〔 Current player kills: 1/3 〕
The system notification chimed in the silence of the church basement like a bell tolling midnight.
Maverick closed the book in his hands.
Not because the notification surprised him — he'd been expecting it. The Hassan fragment assigned to the assassination had been reporting in real-time, and Maverick had tracked every stage of the operation from the moment Vivian entered that warehouse.
No, he closed the book because he'd been staring at the same page for twenty minutes and still couldn't understand a single word on it.
This is ridiculous.
He turned the book over in his hands. It was old — genuinely old, not antique-store old but centuries old, the leather binding cracked and faded, the pages yellowed to the color of weak tea. One of dozens he'd found in the Holy Church's private collection when he'd taken over the building. Texts on thaumaturgy. Magical theory. The fundamental principles of mage craft.
And they were completely, utterly incomprehensible.
It wasn't a language barrier. The words were in English. He recognized every individual word on the page. But the moment they were strung together into sentences, they might as well have been quantum physics written in interpretive dance.
"The practitioner must first establish a stable Od circulation through the primary circuit, aligning the elemental affinity with the root foundation before attempting projection of—"
Gibberish. Beautiful, elaborate, profoundly useless gibberish.
Even with one of the Hassan fragments helping to translate the more archaic passages, Maverick couldn't grasp the core concepts. The texts assumed a baseline understanding of magical theory that he simply didn't have — like handing a calculus textbook to someone who'd just learned what addition was.
He'd had a theory. A hope, really. That by seizing the church and its library, he could teach himself magic. Real magic. Because no matter how good his Servant was, that was borrowed power. Artificial. The only strength you could truly rely on was the strength you built yourself.
Reality had slapped that hope right out of his hands.
Talent isn't the issue. Understanding is. I literally cannot comprehend what these people wrote.
He set the book down with a sigh and picked up his coffee instead.
"Master."
The voice came from directly behind him. No footsteps. No sound of approach. No warning whatsoever. Just a presence that materialized out of thin air like it had always been there.
Maverick did not flinch. He did not jump. He did not spill his coffee.
He was, however, extremely grateful that he hadn't been drinking at that exact moment, because he absolutely would have choked.
"Fragment Zaid's elimination has been confirmed," Hassan reported, her voice calm and neutral behind the skull mask. "Additionally, based on intelligence gathered by all active fragments, we've confirmed visual sightings by at least the Rider and Lancer factions. Your plan has succeeded."
Maverick nodded slowly. "Good work. That means we can move to the next phase."
"It is our duty. And Zaid..." A pause. Brief, but weighted. "He was accustomed to such assignments."
"Accustomed to dying, you mean."
"Yes."
Maverick was quiet for a moment. The image of Hassan of the Hundred Faces — the fragment called Zaid, the tall one, the one who'd taken the assassination mission — flickered through his mind. Followed, unbidden, by a much older image: a golden figure laughing atop a streetlight, radiating contempt for everything below him.
He shook it off. Wrong war. Wrong memory. Different story entirely.
"Thank you," he said simply. "All of you."
Now. Let's talk about why this plan worked.
Because on paper, what Maverick had just pulled off shouldn't have been possible. An Assassin-class Servant — the weakest class in direct combat, with the lowest base stats and a damage modifier that made every other class look like a boss fight — had just successfully eliminated a player and created the illusion of its own death.
In front of witnesses.
While being actively hunted.
The key to understanding how lies in understanding what Hassan of the Hundred Faces actually is.
Every Noble Phantasm is the crystallization of a Heroic Spirit's legend — their life story compressed into a single, definitive ability. Saito's Formless was the distillation of his sword technique. Lancer's spears were the embodiment of his myth.
And Hassan of the Hundred Faces? Their Noble Phantasm was a summary of their entire existence.
As the nineteenth leader of the Hassan-i-Sabbah — the Old Man of the Mountain, the legendary order of assassins that gave the very word "assassin" to the world — Hundred Faces was unique among the lineage. Not the strongest. Not the most feared. But the most versatile.
In life, they had possessed an extraordinary — and terrible — gift: the ability to become anyone. An elderly scholar with encyclopedic knowledge. A young girl with innocent eyes. A seductive dancer. A hardened warrior. A cunning merchant. Each identity wasn't a disguise or an act. Each one was real — a fully formed personality with its own memories, skills, knowledge, and way of seeing the world.
Multiple souls. One body.
The clinical term was Dissociative Identity Disorder. Eighty-eight distinct personalities, coexisting within a single vessel. In life, it had been both their greatest weapon and their deepest curse — the talent that made them the perfect assassin and the illness that ensured they could never be a complete person.
Their wish for the Holy Grail, if they'd ever had the chance to make one, would have been twofold: to be remembered as an individual in history, and to finally, finally unify those fractured selves into one.
But in death — as a Servant — that fragmentation became something else entirely.
Their Noble Phantasm: Zabaniya — Delusional Illusion.
It didn't create clones. That was the wrong word. It divided. Servants weren't flesh and blood — their bodies were constructs of magical energy, held together by the framework of their Spirit Origin. And Hassan of the Hundred Faces could split that framework apart, giving each of their eighty-eight personalities its own independent body.
Eighty-eight individual Assassins, each one autonomous, each one capable of independent thought and action.
The trade-off was raw power. Like cutting a cake — there was only so much magical energy to go around, and every division made each fragment weaker. An individual Hassan fragment was laughably weak in a straight fight. Cannon fodder. The kind of enemy that a proper Servant would swat aside without breaking stride.
But here was the thing that most people missed: when the spirit was divided, the base stats dropped — but the class skills didn't.
Every single fragment retained Presence Concealment. All eighty-eight of them. Eighty-eight invisible, undetectable scouts spread across an entire city, each one capable of independent reconnaissance, each one feeding information back to a single Master.
Total surveillance. Complete intelligence dominance.
And because the fragments were truly independent — no hierarchy, no central command structure beyond Maverick's orders — eliminating one had no effect on the others. Zaid's death didn't compromise the network. The remaining eighty-seven fragments continued operating without interruption, like cutting one node from a mesh network.
The only permanent cost was that Zaid's share of the total power — one eighty-eighth — was gone forever. A small price.
And in exchange, Maverick had accomplished something extraordinary.
He'd killed a player. Confirmed. One down, two to go.
And more importantly — far more importantly — he'd staged the Assassin's death in front of multiple witnesses.
This was the real masterstroke. The move that elevated Maverick's strategy from "clever" to "brilliant."
Think about it from the other players' perspectives.
Everyone in this Holy Grail War knew that the Assassin was dangerous. Not because of raw power — everyone knew Assassin was the weakest class — but because of what Assassin represented. The invisible threat. The knife in the dark. The monster under the bed that you couldn't see, couldn't track, couldn't defend against.
Every Master in this war was afraid of the same thing: being caught alone while their Servant was fighting somewhere else, and having an Assassin materialize behind them with a blade aimed at their spine.
That fear was a constant. A tax on every player's mental bandwidth. It forced them to keep their guards up, stay near their Servants, waste resources on defense instead of offense.
But now?
Now Saber — Hajime Saito himself — had cut Hassan of the Hundred Faces in half. In person. On-camera, so to speak, with multiple factions watching. The Assassin was dead. Confirmed kill. Body on the ground. Case closed.
Which meant the invisible threat was gone.
Which meant every player in the war could finally relax. Stop looking over their shoulders. Stop worrying about the shadows. Redirect their attention — and their paranoia — toward each other.
And while they were all busy fighting openly, convinced that the Assassin problem had been solved...
...eighty-seven invisible fragments would still be crawling through every corner of the city. Watching. Listening. Reporting.
The camper was dead. Long live the camper.
It was a play straight out of the oldest playbook in warfare: fake your own death, let the enemy lower their guard, and strike when they least expect it.
Maverick hadn't invented the tactic. But he'd executed it flawlessly. And unlike certain other Masters in Holy Grail War history who'd tried the same trick with Hassan and gotten sloppy — leaving enough breadcrumbs for a sharp-eyed opponent to figure out the truth — Maverick had drilled one rule into every fragment from day one.
Prioritize concealment above all else. Above the mission. Above the kill. Above everything.
If even one fragment was spotted after tonight, the entire charade collapsed.
So far, so good.
"Two spears. One long, one short. Blue hair. Beauty mark under the left eye."
Maverick sat at the desk in the church basement, a cup of coffee steaming beside him, spreading handwritten notes across the surface like a detective building a case. Hassan — the original body, the core personality — stood behind him, reporting in the measured tones of an intelligence officer delivering a briefing.
"That's almost certainly who I think it is," Maverick muttered, tapping the note card. "But without a photo, I can't be a hundred percent sure. Can't afford to be wrong based on a description alone. For now, mark him as probable — high confidence, not confirmed."
He set that card aside and picked up the next.
"Tall. Scruffy. Six-foot-eight, maybe taller. Pirate ship — the Queen Anne's Revenge."
Maverick snorted. "Well, that's not subtle. His entire identity is basically written on the hull of his ship." He paused, then shook his head. "But it could be misdirection. A smoke screen. Some Servants carry false Noble Phantasms or deliberately reveal misleading information. For now — tentative identification. High probability, but not locked in."
He wrote a name on the card and set it with the others.
"What about Caster? Any progress finding the workshop?"
"Still searching," Hassan replied. "But we've detected a pattern of disappearances in the northern district. Civilians going missing — quietly, without obvious signs of struggle. It matches the profile of a Caster-class Servant establishing a territory."
"How many missing?"
"Seven confirmed. Possibly more."
Maverick's jaw tightened. Civilians. Non-combatants. People who had nothing to do with this war, being snatched off the streets to fuel some Caster's ritual.
He filed the anger away. Later. Deal with it later.
"And Berserker? Any sightings?"
Hassan paused. Opened her mouth to respond.
And was interrupted.
"Report!" A second Hassan fragment materialized in the doorway — smaller, leaner, moving with urgent energy. "Berserker just attacked Rider's position! The Queen Anne's Revenge has been sunk!"
Maverick's coffee cup stopped halfway to his lips.
"...What?"
On the couch nearby, the youngest Hassan fragment — the small one in the white dress who'd made Maverick coffee earlier — stirred in her sleep, mumbled something incoherent, and rolled over.
Maverick stared at the messenger fragment. Then at the original Hassan. Then back at the messenger.
"Berserker sank a warship?"
"Confirmed. The ship is going down as we speak."
Maverick set his coffee down very carefully.
"...This is going to be a long week."
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