From the ledge of a ruined commercial building, six hundred meters away from the epicenter of the chaos, I watched everything.
My vision, enhanced far beyond human limits thanks to my nature as a Heroic Spirit, allowed me to see every crack in the asphalt and every drop of sweat on the faces of the intruders. I was of the Archer class, although at this point in the Singularity, my existence was stained by the dark mud that had corrupted this city and my former companions. I didn't care about the mission of those idiots from Chaldea. My only purpose was to watch and eliminate any anomalies that threatened the order established by the corrupted King Arthur.
And just as she had warned him, it seems they finally stuck their heads into the slaughterhouse.
I saw how the beast, Berserker, the Einzbern's rabid dog, intercepted the three rats from Chaldea. The shield girl, an inexperienced Demi-Servant, tried to stop Heracles' blow. It was foolish. Berserker sent her flying through the rubble as if she were an annoying fly. I felt no pity. In war, the weak die first.
The leader, the silver-haired mage, was left exposed. Berserker's stone axe rose to crush her. I was already calculating my next move for when the giant finished them off and retreated.
But then, something unexpected happened that surprised me, because I didn't detect it and only noticed when it was already there.
An intruder in a white jacket appeared out of nowhere. Literally, out of nowhere. I didn't feel prana fluctuations, there were no summoning circles, nor the characteristic flash of a spiritual transfer. He simply stepped between the colossal weapon and the mage, stopping the blow with his bare arm.
I narrowed my eyes, focusing my vision to the maximum. The impact shattered the boy's arm, exposing bone and flesh. But he didn't retreat. A Servant? Impossible. He didn't emit an iota of magical energy. His prana signature was non-existent, as if he were a civilian human, but no civilian human could stop Heracles' pure force with their physical body, not even with reinforcement magic from the Age of Gods.
Then, the stranger threw a punch.
A black and red lightning bolt tore through space. The shockwave reached my position seconds later, making the steel structure of the building I was standing on vibrate. I watched with disbelief and a growing sense of alarm as Berserker, the invincible monster that had massacred other Servants without breaking a sweat, was sent flying through three skyscrapers by a single physical blow.
"What the hell was that?" I muttered, my voice sounding harsh and annoyed by the unexpected event.
That level of brute force... No, it wasn't just force. Space itself distorted around that impact.
I saw how the stranger healed his arm in a matter of seconds, the flesh and bone regenerating with an efficiency that rivaled the best healing spells from the Clock Tower, but again, with no trace of prana. That dark, residual energy surrounding him was something completely alien.
I decided I had seen enough. This guy wasn't a Servant, but he was a monster in human skin. My survival instinct, forged in countless battlefields across the ages, screamed at me to retreat immediately and report to Saber.
I turned around, preparing my magical circuits to jump to the next rooftop.
But before I could take the first step, I felt a gaze piercing the back of my neck. An icy pressure that paralyzed me for a fraction of a second.
I turned slowly. Six hundred meters away, in the middle of the destroyed street, the one in the white jacket had turned his head. His face was still hidden by the shadow of his hood, but I knew with absolute certainty that he was looking directly at me.
He had detected me. How? I was completely concealing my presence.
Then, the stranger raised his right hand towards my direction.
The blood he had spilled on the asphalt when his arm was shattered began to tremble. Defying gravity, the deep red pool rose into the air. The drops rapidly gathered in the palm of his hand, compressing violently until they formed half a dozen floating spheres of blood, dense and the size of tennis balls.
Danger. Absolute, irrational danger set off every alarm in my head. My innate ability, Eye of the Mind (True), began processing variables at a dizzying speed.
"Trace, On."
I didn't hesitate. I jumped back, plummeting from the edge of the building just as the stranger made a slight forward motion with his hand.
There was no sound of a shot, only the sonic boom.
The spheres of blood crossed the six-hundred-meter distance in the blink of an eye. The spot where I had been standing a microsecond earlier exploded. The reinforced concrete, the steel, and the glass were pulverized, leaving a smoking crater on the skyscraper's rooftop.
I landed on a lower balcony and didn't waste time. I started running inside the building, using my Servant's agility to descend through the elevator shaft.
"Blood magic?" I thought frantically as I ran. "I've seen vampires and Dead Apostles use it, but... at this speed? With this destructive force?"
A crash to my left interrupted my thoughts. The blood spheres hadn't stopped at the rooftop. They had pierced several floors downwards, tracking me like homing missiles.
Two red projectiles burst through the hallway wall in front of me.
I instantly projected Kanshou and Bakuya into my hands. My twin swords crossed the air in a perfect defensive arc, guided by the predictions of my Eye of the Mind.
CLANG! CLANG!
The impact nearly dislocated my shoulders. My boots skidded on the hallway tiles, dragging me back several meters. I looked at my swords. The blades were cracked and crumbling.
"This doesn't make sense," I growled between clenched teeth. "This blood is harder than tempered steel!"
I spun on my heels and leaped through the skyscraper's window, falling towards a narrow alley.
"Who the hell is this guy? Strong as Berserker, with absurd regeneration and such perfect blood manipulation!"
I needed to use the environment. I moved in zigzags through the ruins, jumping over debris.
But the blood followed me. It turned corners, pierced brick walls as if they were paper. And what was worse: it was multiplying. The number of projectiles in the form of needles and blades far exceeded the volume the boy had lost in the street.
I reached a ruined intersection and stopped, cornered. From all directions, the red projectiles stopped in the air, surrounding me in a perfect sphere, ready to execute their prey. Hundreds of them.
My Eye of the Mind gave me the cold, calculating answer: evasion was impossible. Blocking with twin swords was useless.
So I created dozens of swords that began to project around me, ready to intercept the omnidirectional attack.
The blood shot forward.
I moved like a blur, my mind processing trajectories in milliseconds. I deflected the first wave of needles. I cut through the second wave of spheres, forcing myself to switch between Kanshou and Bakuya every two blocks because the impact shattered my projections. I blocked, dodged, and cut for what seemed like an eternity but was only ten seconds of high intensity.
Despite doing my utmost to defend myself, I knew I wasn't going to last long, so I needed a conceptual countermeasure.
"I am the bone of my sword!" I roared, forcing my circuits to the maximum. "Hrunting!"
The jagged sword, the hound that tracks the scent of blood, materialized in my hand. If his weapon was blood, I would use a Noble Phantasm designed to devour it. I altered the sword's shape into a massive arrow, placed it on my black bow, and aimed at the epicenter of the swarm.
"Disappear!"
I released the bowstring. Hrunting shot out like a crimson lightning bolt. Just as I calculated, the cursed arrow began to absorb the boy's blood in its path, swallowing the red spheres and using them to increase its own power and size as it headed directly towards the stranger in the white jacket in the distance.
For a fraction of a second, I thought it had worked. And then the weapon would hunt down the intruder.
But for some damned reason, despite the distance and concealment, I felt that the damn anomaly did something because the blood reacted to my action to counteract it.
The dark energy—that damn energy unrelated to prana—exploded. The blood that Hrunting had just absorbed was not assimilated. Instead, something unexpected happened. All the remaining blood that was about to be absorbed (along with the absorbed blood acting as a "poison" for the weapon) began to tremble and then expanded near my Noble Phantasm. Before exploding and breaking the laws of sorcery as if it were nothing.
CRACK!
The projection of Hrunting exploded into pieces in the air, turning into specks of blue light, destroyed from within. And the blood that shattered it didn't fall to the ground; it multiplied exponentially, fed by that cursed energy.
"Damn it! Trace—!"
I tried to alter the space around me, I tried to freeze the blood in the air by projecting weapons of glacial ice, but nothing worked. That energy rejected my concepts. It didn't matter if I froze it, cut it, or absorbed it; the crimson liquid simply adapted, expanded, and attacked again from multiple blind angles. It was an omnidirectional nightmare.
The swarm closed in on me.
My Eye of the Mind calculated the final trajectories. One hundred forty imminent impacts. Zero escape routes.
SPLASH! SPLASH! SPLASH!
Pain exploded throughout my entire body. Dozens of crimson stakes pierced me simultaneously. My shoulders, my ribs, my thighs, my lungs. The massive impact lifted me off the ground and brutally pinned me against the concrete wall behind me.
I dropped my twin swords, which vanished into specks of blue light. I coughed up a large amount of dark blood, my Servant body trembling uncontrollably, hung like a macabre puppet.
"Ah... ah..."
But the pain from the impalements wasn't the end. I felt my insides begin to melt. The boy's blood, now coursing through my own spiritual veins, acted like a lethal poison. It was corrosive, burning with that cursed energy that destroyed my magic circuits and destabilized my Spiritual Core from the inside out.
I clenched my teeth, feeling my existence crumble. It was impossible to purge this. I had lost.
"Damn... anomaly," I cursed at the unexpected anomaly, looking up at the red, smoky sky of Fuyuki, as my vision rapidly darkened.
Who the hell was that guy? He wasn't a Servant. He wasn't a mage. He was simply an absurd beast that broke all the rules. That intruder sent by Alaya? How he got here didn't matter; I was finished. Why...? Why is my luck always so fucked?
"Saber... I'm sorry," I whispered, as my legs began to turn into golden dust. "The intruder is too..."
My consciousness shut down abruptly. My corrupted body, unable to withstand the poisonous corrosion of that cursed blood for another second, completely vanished into nothingness, leaving only red stains on the destroyed wall.
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[Point of view of Mash Kyrielight]
My feet finally touched solid ground after emerging from the rubble of the shop. My hands still trembled slightly as I gripped the hilt of my shield.
In front of us, the street was a monument to destruction. The furrow left by Berserker's body being hurled through the air stretched for hundreds of meters, a linear crater cutting through the ruined city. And in the center of it all, he was there. The one in the white jacket.
Our mysterious savior, the one for whom no one had yet answered the question. I was about to respond when something stopped me.
He looked specifically at the top of one of the destroyed buildings surrounding us and then began to raise his hand.
I saw small spheres of his own blood begin to form.
"Slicing Exorcism"
The blood shot into the distance at a speed my eyes couldn't detect; I could only briefly see the red flash of blood. There was a series of distant booms, and then he calmly lowered his hand.
"Are you all right?" He turned to us and asked again, as if he hadn't done something impressive a few seconds ago.
The voice was calm. Too calm for the apocalyptic scenario we were in. Senpai was on the ground, still processing the shock, and Director Olga looked about to faint. I, on the other hand, felt my combat instincts relax slightly.
The normal thing in this situation is to be cautious. As a newly formed Demi-Servant, my duty was to doubt any unknown entity in a Singularity. We didn't know if he was a rogue Servant or someone with hidden intentions.
But I didn't feel hostility. The only thing filling my mind at that moment was overwhelming gratitude. He had saved us. When I failed to stop Berserker, when my shield wasn't enough, and I thought I was going to see Senpai die before my eyes, he intervened. He was willing to lose an arm just to protect Director Olga. Someone who does that, no matter how strange or monstrously strong they are, couldn't be an absolute enemy.
I approached Senpai and offered him my gloved hand. "Senpai, get behind me."
He slowly turned towards us, his face still shadowed by his hood, only revealing his jaw. He put his hands in the pockets of his jacket, the sleeve stained with blood.
"There was an enemy spying on us from that building in the distance," he said in a casual tone, pointing with his chin in the direction he had fired the blood. "I already took care of it. It was annoying having someone watching. Are you hurt?"
"No," I managed to articulate, my voice sounding much smaller than I intended. "We're unharmed, thanks to you. But... who are you?"
"I'm just—"
He couldn't finish the sentence.
The ground beneath our feet vibrated violently. A roar, even more bestial and deafening than the previous one, erupted from the distance, from the cloud of dust where Berserker had crashed.
"ROOOOOOOOAAAAAAAR!"
The survival instinct from my Servant side screamed in my mind. The immense and overwhelming presence of the giant was returning, and this time, he was completely enraged. A dark red light began to shine from the dust, pulsing like a furious heart.
"He's coming this way," I warned, raising my shield again, tension returning in an instant. "And he's moving much faster!"
"Oh, so the big guy survived that?" He sighed, sounding genuinely annoyed, like someone whose break had just been interrupted.
He didn't even turn completely to face the approaching threat. He remained in profile towards Berserker's direction, who was charging through the debris like an out-of-control locomotive, destroying everything in his path, ready to crush us all.
He took his right hand out of his pocket. He raised his index and middle fingers, holding them together, and simply made a gesture, tracing a horizontal line in the air towards the giant charging at him.
I raised an eyebrow in confusion at that, for a few milliseconds, nothing happened to the naked eye.
But my enhanced senses felt that the very structure of reality was cut with the precision of a divine scalpel.
A hundred meters away, Berserker stopped dead. His roar was abruptly choked off.
Then, the horizontal line manifested in the physical world.
In front of our strange savior, everything within a radius of more than three hundred meters was split in half. The collapsed skyscrapers were cleanly cut, their upper halves slowly sliding before crashing noisily to the ground. The traffic lights, the abandoned cars, the very asphalt of the street, everything was divided by an invisible and unstoppable force.
And Berserker, the beast with seemingly indomitable strength... also.
I watched, eyes wide, as the colossus's massive torso slowly separated from his hips. A perfect, clean cut, crossing his muscle-armored abdomen. The upper half of the giant slipped and fell heavily onto the asphalt with a dull thud, followed by a massive eruption of dark blood that painted the street red. His legs remained standing for one more second before collapsing as well.
The silence that followed was absolute. Only the sound of buildings collapsing in the distance from the invisible cut could be heard.
Senpai let out a gasp of sheer astonishment behind me. Director Olga simply brought her hands to her head, muttering unintelligible things about "magical impossibilities" and "violation of the principles of sorcery."
He lowered his hand and scratched his cheek.
"My bad. I overdid it and broke a little more of the street than I intended," he apologized to us, shrugging.
A little more of the street? He had split half a city block in two along with the strongest Servant I had felt in my short life.
But the calm didn't last long. He frowned slightly under his hood and raised an eyebrow.
I looked in the direction of his gaze. The two severed halves of Berserker weren't fading into prana dust as should happen when a Servant is defeated. Instead, a massive amount of reddish magical energy began to surround the mutilated remains.
To my horror, I saw the torso and legs begin to drag themselves towards each other, connected by tendrils of flesh, muscle, and red light. He was reconstructing himself. He was healing from being split in half.
"Is he regenerating?" Senpai whispered behind me.
I watched the process with doubt. If the Servant hadn't died and was regenerating this way... it must be part of his abilities. I tried to think of a legend that spoke of something like that, but nothing came to mind immediately.
As a curious detail, my mind processed. I saw that his regeneration was surprisingly slower compared to the instantaneous healing our unexpected ally had shown on his own arm minutes before.
"What kind of Heroic Spirit is this?" Olga Marie murmured, recovering her breath a little and analyzing the situation. "That attack should have killed him instantly!"
He crossed his arms over his chest, observing the macabre regeneration without showing an iota of fear. "I sense a strange energy feeding him," he commented out loud, more to himself than to us. "Is it some kind of adaptation to attacks? No... the structure of his soul is the same. It seems only his body is modifying itself... how illogical."
I didn't understand what our savior meant. But I did notice that Berserker was about to finish healing, but before I could shout a warning or Berserker could resume his murderous frenzy.
The mysterious savior vanished from our sight.
It wasn't a fast jump. He simply erased himself from existence where he was standing.
A tenth of a second later, he appeared exactly in front of Berserker, closing the hundred-meter distance in zero time. The colossus had just finished rejoining his torso and opened his mouth to unleash another roar.
But he didn't give him time.
He extended his right hand and placed it flat against the Servant's giant abdomen. The posture was intimate, silent. There was no momentum for a punch.
I saw his lips move under the hood, articulating a single word, soft but charged with an overwhelming pressure that made every hair on my body stand on end a hundred meters away.
"Hachi."
What happened next I wouldn't know how to describe... but it left me stunned.
His hand shone for a fraction of a second. Before Berserker's massive body exploded into a bloody pulp, leaving no trace of flesh or bone... everything violently transformed into a massive torrent of blood.
A rain of thick red liquid burst towards the sky, covering the street, painting the rubble. The giant was completely physically disintegrated. Nothing was left to regenerate. Not even a part of his body, and any magical trace disappeared within seconds. It seems our savior made sure that any "adaptation" the giant possessed couldn't be used again, definitively.
The rain of blood fell heavily onto the asphalt. The one in white, standing in the middle of the crimson drizzle that didn't seem to stain his clothes, slowly lowered his hand before putting it back in his pockets.
The night in Fuyuki city fell back into a disturbing silence, broken only by our agitated breathing. The greatest threat we had encountered in this Singularity, the unstoppable monster, had been erased from the map as if he were a mere annoying insect.
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