"Ase—"
Martial skill this refined—in life he had to have been a formidable warrior, and even as a Heroic Spirit he was anything but weak. A pity, then, that Mad Enhancement and his Master's limitations had reduced him to a brute with nothing left but his sword arm. He couldn't even wield his strongest Noble Phantasm.
If he had been summoned as a proper Saber, he might well have ranked among the top-tier Servants of this Grail War. The old worm had deliberately pinned the Berserker modifier onto Kariya's summoning—partly because the tag made the Servant easier for Kariya to control, but maybe also to head off the possibility that the boy would call up some Servant clever enough to turn the blade back on him.
Perhaps because Yimi had driven Saber off the night before, Lancelot was visibly putting more into this fight than he had against Gilgamesh. Mad Enhancement had also conveniently scrubbed away the usual hesitations a knight might feel against women and children.
A length of steel pipe—rendered into a Noble Phantasm by his hand—hammered down onto the shaft of her spear. The A-rank Strength behind it sent a tremor through her small hands, but her own peculiar nature shunted the full force of the blow off to some unfortunate Dead Apostle in a distant land, who could absorb it on her behalf.
"Flying Roundslash!"
A bad habit she'd picked up from Master Ka-le—shouting the technique name as she swung. A rapid Flying Roundslash, loaded with top-tier Prana Burst, blasted him backward and plowed a trench dozens of meters long through the ground.
"Ahrrrr!"
Before the dust had even settled, jagged stones came spraying out of it, each one threaded with glowing lines of prana—ordinary debris that his touch had turned into Noble Phantasms.
Thank god Ritsuka had thought ahead and scouted out an empty patch of land behind the Matou property for them to smash up.
Anyone watching could see Berserker's strength flagging by the minute. Ritsuka hadn't spent a drop of prana, while on the other side, a Master was enduring agony every second to keep his Servant fueled.
The remaining Grail War participants were watching the fight, and even the amateur Masters among them could see that Berserker, on technique alone, outclassed Ruler by a wide margin—provided the other side was willing to meet technique with technique. The problem was that she wasn't.
You fight your way, I'll fight mine: your attacks she wouldn't block and couldn't be made to take, but just try leaving one of hers unblocked. That single trait made a mockery of every refined technique in the world.
Add to that the way the little-girl Servant hurled prana around like it was free, and the logical corollary started to whisper: her Master might be a monster in her own right.
Ritsuka and Lord El-Melloi II had been working from the assumption that, faced with a threat like Yimi, the other Masters would have almost certainly formed an alliance by now. But they weren't working with a genuine god's-eye view of the other camps.
Aside from Kirei Kotomine's group, the rest of the participants were hard pressed to actually ally with anyone—some because of who they were tied to, others because of the personalities involved on either Master or Servant side. The best any of them could manage was a temporary ceasefire.
How badly did Saber want the Grail—was she more 'knight' in her heart, or more 'king'? Would she break ranks and gang up on a Ruler who looked like nothing more than a child, if that's what it took to win? Kiritsugu neither knew nor cared to know.
Since summoning Saber, the only person who had done any actual talking with her was Irisviel—the stand-in Master. The number of times Kiritsugu himself had held a real conversation with Saber, he could count on both hands.
But from this distance...
Up on a rooftop, Kiritsugu had been keeping Ritsuka in his sniper-rifle scope for a solid stretch, and she hadn't once shown any sign of sensing him, the way she had before.
A bluff?
He squeezed the trigger with Ritsuka's head centered in the crosshairs. Because he'd never been willing to underestimate her from the start, this round was an Origin Bullet.
The Origin Bullet was a Mystic Code made from his own ground-down rib, chambered for 7.62×63mm sniper rifle rounds.
Sixty-six had been produced in total. Not counting this one, he'd already used thirty-seven. The name was literal—each round was a Mystic Code infused with his Origin. The raw stopping power was less than a standard bullet, but the rounds carried a secondary effect: they destabilized prana flow and crippled Magic Circuits.
The stronger the magecraft in play, the more prana it demanded—and the more destructive the backlash when that prana went out of control.
That was his own operating principle. If the Servant herself was an immovable mountain, you took out her Master.
Ritsuka looked like nothing more than a high-school-aged girl, but even if you swapped her and Yimi and stood a girl who looked under ten in her place, Kiritsugu would not hesitate. He'd already pulled the trigger on his biological father as a child. He'd done the same to the master he'd loved as a teacher and mother, as a teenager. Another pull was nothing.
"Huh?"
Ritsuka felt a faint stir of prana, and her Command Spell activated on its own, without any input from her. A warm white radiance stretched out from Yimi's body toward her—and a moment later, something twisted itself free of her body and shot away.
Following the trail of white light to its end, she even caught a glimpse of a long-haired old man whose skull suddenly came apart, the whole body toppling backward to die for reasons nobody present could explain.
Ritsuka didn't recognize him. That had been the current head of the Einzbern family.
"Master!"
Sensing the disturbance at once, Yimi flung Lancelot—whom she had by now completely pinned in the crater—aside and sprinted back to Ritsuka on her short legs.
Only then did Ritsuka catch up to what had just happened. "Someone shot at me?"
She'd deliberately picked a tucked-away spot to hide in, too.
Of course, to a veteran assassin like Kiritsugu, one glance was enough to pick out the best cover, and the best vantage for watching it.
"A miss?"
Kiritsugu frowned. He didn't understand why the Origin Bullet hadn't done its job—any prana-based defense should have been carved straight through.
One shot failed; rather than wait for Ruler's retaliation, Kiritsugu packed up his equipment and cleared out without hesitation.
"I'm alright, Ruler." Ritsuka tried to work out the angle the bullet had come in from. She didn't need to think hard to guess who had done it.
She'd let her guard down for one moment today, and nearly gotten killed. And she'd thought she'd picked a good spot—somewhere hard to hit.
She lifted her hand and looked at her Command Spells, now short one mark. This was the first time one had activated on its own.
"Mn..." Yimi had noticed the Command Spell too.
This was an effect of Yimi's skill, [Miracle]. Passive activations had been rare before now—but in exchange for passively shielding Ritsuka, one Command Spell was the price.
Yimi turned her head, looking around for the shooter. Not finding anyone, she laid her hand on the back of Ritsuka's hand—the one with the Command Spell mark—and tried to use [Miracle] to restore the spent mark.
At the same instant, mid-retreat, Kiritsugu felt a sharp sting on the back of his hand and looked down to discover that his already-dwindling two Command Seal marks were, for no reason he could name, down to one.
"?"
"Ruler—behind you!"
"Ahrrrrrr!!"
Yimi had made it back, but Berserker hadn't been fully dealt with, and he came roaring in after her.
The light of Miracle spread over him too, folding him into its radius.