"How rude."
"Exactly. This is why I don't like women with short tempers."
"You bastards!"
Perhaps this was the eternal fate of the honest spearman. Paired with a reckless Master, and you get sold out by your own side. Paired with a steady Master, and you both get sold out together. Either way, the guy with the spear ends up doing all the work.
Crystal's furious screaming from the café window washed over Napoleon and the Captain like water off a duck's back. Neither of them so much as flinched.
Because — putting aside their general lack of motivation — they weren't wrong. There was genuinely no room for them in the current fight.
The battle between Lancer and Berserker had collapsed into close-quarters chaos. The two of them were practically on top of each other — weaving, striking, dodging within arm's length, moving so fast that the space between them blurred. Any ranged attack into that mess would hit Lancer as easily as Berserker. Friendly fire wasn't a risk; it was a certainty.
The smart play was to wait. Let Lancer create an opening. Then capitalize.
Of course, the Captain wasn't waiting for Lancer's opening. He was waiting for a clean shot at Damian's head. Unfortunately, the kid had retreated from the rooftop into the interior of the café's second floor, and was currently — based on the sounds drifting down through the shattered ceiling — vomiting his guts out.
No line of sight. No shot. No luck.
But the stalemate didn't last long.
The kite-and-poke strategy was working.
It was working beautifully, in fact, and that was precisely what made it so miserable for Berserker.
Lancer couldn't land a killing blow. His spear strikes didn't have the raw power to punch through A+ Endurance in a single hit. But he didn't need to kill with one strike. He needed to kill with a thousand — and he was well on his way.
The twin spears danced.
In the fury of sustained combat, the talisman wrappings that had concealed Lancer's weapons had finally torn free, revealing their true forms beneath.
The long spear was crimson. Not painted — red, from butt to tip, the color of arterial blood, the shaft thrumming with an inner light that pulsed in time with Lancer's heartbeat. A demonic weapon. A cursed weapon. The kind of spear that didn't just wound — it violated, bypassing physical defenses through some fundamental magical principle that had nothing to do with how hard you could swing it.
The short spear was golden. Yellowed. Ancient. And wrapped in a different kind of energy — not heat, not light, but something darker. A curse. A decay. The lingering, rotting promise that whatever wound this spear inflicted would not heal.
Together, they were a nightmare.
The crimson spear would strike first — quick, precise, exploiting a gap in Berserker's guard to score a thin, shallow cut. Barely a graze. Nothing that should matter against A+ Endurance.
But the wound would bleed. Because the crimson spear didn't care about Endurance. Its magic bypassed the defense entirely, treating Berserker's iron skin like ordinary flesh.
Then the golden spear would follow up. A touch. A flick. Barely more than a tap against the open wound.
And the wound would stop healing.
Cut. Curse. Retreat. Repeat.
Again and again and again, in an endless, maddening cycle that Berserker couldn't escape because he couldn't catch Lancer, and he couldn't outlast Lancer, and every second that passed added another red line to the growing collection on his body.
After five minutes of this, Berserker looked like a butcher's diagram.
Hundreds of thin, shallow cuts crisscrossed his obsidian skin — each one weeping dark blood, each one stubbornly refusing to close. The crimson against his black skin made him look like he was wearing a red net. A web of wounds that, individually, meant nothing. Collectively? They were bleeding him dry.
A death by a thousand cuts. Literal, precise, and agonizing.
Berserker stood in the center of the ruined street, breathing hard, his golden eyes scanning for the blue blur that kept appearing at the edge of his vision and vanishing before he could close his fist around it.
And then — something shifted behind those eyes.
The fury was still there. The battle-lust was still burning. But underneath it, a decision was being made. The kind of cold, calculated decision that shouldn't have been possible for a Berserker-class Servant but was absolutely possible for this one.
He opened his mouth.
And roared.
"ROAR—!"
Lancer's instincts screamed.
Not a battle cry. Not a howl of rage. This was different — pitched differently, resonating differently, carrying a purpose that his warrior's intuition recognized even if his conscious mind couldn't name it.
A signal.
"An opening!"
But the spearman in him couldn't ignore it. Berserker had thrown his head back, arms wide, chest exposed — the most vulnerable posture he'd shown since the fight began. Every combat reflex Lancer possessed demanded he exploit it. Now. Before the moment passed.
The crimson spear blazed with seductive, demonic light. Lancer surged forward—
And from the café's second floor, a hoarse voice cut through the chaos like a blade.
"I've got it! By the power of my Command Spell — BERSERKER! RELEASE YOUR NOBLE PHANTASM!"
"ROAR!"
The crimson mark on Damian's hand detonated.
A pillar of magical energy erupted from the Command Spell — raw, overwhelming, orders of magnitude more powerful than anything a single bottom-tier mage circuit should have been able to produce. The Command Spell didn't just authorize the Noble Phantasm. It fueled it. Bridging the impossible gap between what Damian's mana reserves could provide and what the Noble Phantasm demanded.
Because this was why a Command Spell was needed.
This Noble Phantasm was so vast, so consuming, so fundamentally excessive in its mana cost that no Master in this war — not with their single, lowest-grade mage circuits — could have activated it under normal circumstances. The energy required was simply beyond them.
But Command Spells were miracles compressed into crimson ink. They could make the impossible possible. And Damian had just spent one.
The result was immediate.
Green fire.
Not natural fire. Not magical fire in the conventional sense. Hellfire — sickly, luminescent green, burning cold instead of hot, spreading across the ground from Berserker's feet like a living thing. It moved fast. Faster than anyone could run. Spreading outward in every direction, consuming the asphalt, the rubble, the abandoned cars, everything it touched — not destroying, but claiming.
And from within the flames, they began to rise.
Bones first. Blackened, charred, ancient bones — femurs and ribcages and skulls pushing up through the burning green surface like crops sprouting from hellish soil. Then the rest. Arms assembling. Legs locking into place. Jaws clacking shut. Empty eye sockets igniting with the same green fire that had birthed them.
Skeletons.
One.
Ten.
A hundred.
A thousand.
Armed. Armored. Shields locked in formation. Spears raised. Moving in lockstep with the mechanical precision of soldiers who had drilled for eternity and feared nothing because they had nothing left to fear.
Ten thousand.
The street filled. Wall to wall. Building to building. A tide of black bone and green fire that stretched as far as the eye could see, choking every road, every alley, every escape route with an endless, undying army that simply would not stop coming.
"You have got to be kidding me." The Captain's voice was a whisper. His face had gone the color of old paper. "Nobody said anything about this."
Napoleon's eyes were wide. Not with fear — with the analytical intensity of a military genius processing a battlefield that had just fundamentally changed shape. "No wonder. A Command Spell to activate the Noble Phantasm — the mana cost must be astronomical. Without the Command Spell's boost, deployment would be flatly impossible."
Lancer said nothing. He was on the ground.
The skeleton tide had hit him like a wave — dozens of them, then hundreds, swarming over him the instant they'd formed. Individually, they were nothing. Cannon fodder. A single swing of his spear could shatter ten of them. But they didn't stop. The ones he destroyed were replaced instantly by new ones rising from the green flames. And the ones behind them pressed forward. And the ones behind them.
It was the nightmare of every great warrior: an enemy that didn't care about casualties. That couldn't be intimidated. That would absorb every blow, every kill, every act of superhuman violence and simply fill the gap with more bodies.
Layers of shields, stacked like walls, heavy as mountains. Spears thrown in coordinated volleys — not powerful individually, but relentless, continuous, a rain of bone-tipped projectiles that never stopped falling.
Lancer fought. Of course he fought. He was Lancer. He'd been born fighting and he'd die fighting and everything in between was just practice. His twin spears carved arcs of destruction through the skeleton ranks, shattering formations, scattering bones, painting the green fire with the white dust of pulverized remains.
But for every ten he destroyed, twenty more took their place.
And he was bleeding. The cuts from the skeleton spears were shallow — nothing compared to what Berserker could inflict — but there were so many of them. A graze here. A nick there. Blood on his arms. Blood on his face. Blood mixing with the sweat and the dust and the green-tinged ash of a thousand burning bones.
Crystal watched from the window.
Her face was white. Her hands were shaking. Her mind — the same mind that had spent the first day of this war fantasizing about romance novels — was now running through every scenario she could think of, searching for a way out.
She couldn't find one.
"How..." she whispered. "How are we supposed to fight that?"
And from below, Damian's voice drifted up from the café — steady, calm, almost cheerful.
"That's right. All of them. Every skeleton you see is part of my Servant's Noble Phantasm. They can't die. They can't be stopped. You can break them apart, and they'll reassemble. You can scatter them, and they'll reform. This is the trump card we've been holding — and it is a chasm you will never cross."
Crystal's knees buckled. She sank to the floor, staring at the impossible army below, and felt something she hadn't felt since this war began.
True despair.
"Are you kidding me?" she breathed. "Am I really going to die here?" Her voice cracked. Rose. Broke into a scream aimed at the empty air where Lancer's Spirit Form presence should have been. "GET ME OUT OF HERE! Open the mental link! NOW!"
"Impossible," she heard herself whisper. "How could anyone win against this? How could anyone beat—"
"Master!" Lancer's voice cut through the link — strained, breathless, fighting for every word between spear swings. "Pull yourself together! Use a Command Spell! Bring me to your side — I'll find a way to get us out!"
Crystal's hand trembled over her Command Spells. Two left. After burning one to save Saito at the docks, she only had—
Wait. That had been Vivian. Vivian was dead. Crystal still had all three.
But using one now meant—
Damian watched the scene unfold from the café with a satisfied hum. He leaned against the window frame, arms crossed, and let his gaze drift down toward Crystal.
She was kneeling on the floor. Shaking. Terrified. And — he couldn't help but notice — very pretty.
Not quite as beautiful as that girl he'd seen on the bridge. Amber, or whatever her name was. But Crystal had a different kind of appeal. Less refined, more raw. The kind of beauty that hit you when the person wasn't trying.
You know, Damian thought, tilting his head, if I spared her, she could take the second survivor slot. The rules say two to three people can make it out. Having a girl around wouldn't be the worst—
BOOM.
The thought died mid-formation.
Because a cannon blast — not a gunshot, not an explosion, a full-bore cannon blast — tore through the skeleton army like a fist through wet paper, vaporizing a column of bone soldiers fifty meters wide and sending shockwaves rippling across the entire battlefield.
Every eye turned.
Every skull turned.
Even Berserker turned.
And there, standing atop the overturned car he'd been hiding behind — one boot planted on the bumper, his imperial coat billowing in the shockwave of his own cannon fire, the signal cannon in his right hand still smoking, his phone in his left hand where he'd just received Amber's Command Spell transmission — was Napoleon.
The green hellfire reflected in his eyes.
The skeleton army stretched to every horizon.
And Napoleon Bonaparte looked at it all — the impossible numbers, the undying soldiers, the tide of death that had brought three Servants to their knees — and grinned.
"Impossible?"
His voice carried across the battlefield like a cannon shot of its own. Not shouted. Not screamed. Projected — with the absolute, unshakeable authority of a man who had stood before a million soldiers and told them they would conquer the world.
"NO! The word 'impossible' is not in my dictionary!"
He raised the cannon high. The barrel was glowing — not with gunpowder, but with something deeper. Something prismatic. Rainbow light bleeding from the muzzle, from the stock, from the very air around him, as if reality itself was bending to accommodate what was about to happen.
"Everyone! It is NOT time for despair!"
He lowered his phone. On the screen, a single message glowed:
〔 Command Spell activated. Give him everything. — Amber 〕
The magical energy hit him like a tidal wave. Amber's Command Spell — transmitted remotely, through the phone, across miles of city — slammed into his Spirit Origin and detonated, flooding every circuit of his being with power that far exceeded what a single mage circuit could produce.
His signal cannon began to change.
The barrel extended. The stock widened. The entire weapon grew — doubling, tripling in size — its surface erupting with prismatic light that shifted through every color of the visible spectrum. Rainbow energy spiraled up the barrel like a helix, each revolution brighter than the last, until the cannon was no longer a weapon but a monument. A pillar of light held in the hands of a man who refused to accept the concept of defeat.
Napoleon aimed it at the sky.
"Open your eyes. Look closely. This is not a possibility. This is BELIEF! CONVICTION! And therefore—"
His voice rose to a roar.
"—my cannon can PIERCE THE HEAVENS!"
The rainbow energy reached critical mass. The air shattered. The ground cracked. Every skeleton within a hundred meters was blown flat by the sheer pressure wave of the gathering power.
"O Rainbow! O Rainbow!"
Napoleon's eyes burned with light that wasn't human, wasn't divine, but something in between — the radiance of a man whose legend was built on making the impossible routine.
"Now — bridge the gap of possibility and SOAR INTO THE SKY!"
He fired.
"ARC DE TRIOMPHE DE L'ÉTOILE!"
— The Rainbow Bow of Triumphant Song! —