BOOOOOM
An explosion lit up the street.
On top of the rooftop of a building, two hundred meters of distance from the site of explosion, a young woman with brown hair tied in a ponytail and wearing a black and white suit was holding an anti tank sniper rifle taking aim at the explosion site.
From the cloud of smoke caused by the explosion a figure bolted dressed in armor holding a girl in his arms, it was a tall man with short brown hair and goatee.
[Fire.] On an earphone inside her ear a man's voice issued the order and she obliged by pressing the trigger on her rifle.
BANG
Simultaneously, from another four different buildings, another four shots were fired, all five of them traveling at the speed of a thousand meters per second aiming for the girl. They were all fired from different directions while the servant was still with both feet in the air from his leap so he had no way to avoid the shots of five expert snipers.
But he didn't need to.
TING TING TING TING TING
Twisting mid air like an acrobat in a circus, the man spun his body like a certain hedgehog and, using his armored right arm like a whip, deviated the trajectories of all five high speed bullets.
[Prepare to take aim once again.] Julius's voice echoed in the transmitter inside their ear.
Alicia pulled on her bolt handle to empty the chamber, the next bullet was lifted up from the magazine but it was already too late.
His foot touched the street.
And then he was gone.
[Argh.] In the intercoms a man's scream echoed inside her head. She did not need to turn around to understand what had just happened and trying to would be foolish as their enemy was a Servant anyway.
'How fast.' She immediately thought in awe of the incredible physical ability displayed by the servant and she knew he didn't even use any sort of magical energy empowerment but just his simple physical might. However this didn't scare her. 'Judging by the voice the one he took down was Alpha 1 placed on vertex A.'
Of the five snipers, her included, placed across the building surrounding the lair of the enemy Master the shooters were in way that three of the would be placed the nearest to the site in a shape that resembled the vertexes of a triangle while the remaining two were placed facing the imaginary sides of the triangle leaving one of them open at a further distance.
The reason for this kind of placement was because the three nearest snipers were placed to act as sacrifices and to guide the enemy's attack direction.
[He's coming Alicia.] Julius spoke in her intercom.
Alicia did not even stop to think for a second and without even looking inside her holographic scope she turned and aimed her humongous rifle in the direction of vertex A.
"Gear." She whispered in a barely audible voice.
BANG
She didn't even take aim and fired the next shot.
She knew it would all be useless, no matter what a bullet fired by someone like her would never injure neither the Servant nor the girl in his arms and so knew the enemy as well, the only thing that could stand in the warrior's way was another Servant.
And that was what she bet on.
Alicia pulled on her bolt handle once again and after exactly a second and a quarter quickly fired another shot.
BANG
The second bullet tore through the night, chasing the first along the exact same path.
On the other hand the man was already in the air as he had leapt straight from his position to aim for the next sniper, Alicia, while looking at his surroundings warily to look out for another Servant. He could feel their presence faintly in the area but he couldn't quite catch where it was exactly.
He saw the first bullet coming and blocked it with his right arm.
TING
Strangely the bullet didn't get deflected away after impacting with his arm at high speed but simply lightly bounced off before it folded on itself and exploded in the air right near him.
PUUUF
Suddenly a cloud of dust covered the Masters and Servant pair but before they could realize what the enemy might have had in mind the second bullet was already upon them.
TING
The man immediately deflected it using his right arm, it was a perfectly normal bullet after all and that was what Alicia had hoped for.
If the first line of snipers were just sacrifices than her role as a second liner was–
BOOOOOM
The sky lit up like a massive firework, destroying even the rooftops of the buildings under the Servant's jumpline.
The first bullet she shot at him was actually a mystic code made to use a basic spell called Flash Air.
It was a basic alchemy spell that replaced something with something else, hence it was called Displacement Magecraft, however the displacement mentioned was not a spatial one but more one of composition of the target.
The spell did not work by exchanging two objects' positions but by exchanging the structure of an object with that of another. It was essentially a magical energy shortcut for chemical and conceptual changes in a target, the only downside is that a degradation in the displaced target will occur but that didn't matter to Alicia.
The first bullet transformed the air into tightly concentrated powder particles for a few dozens of meters to replace nitrogen, argon and dioxide that made up the air that we breathe.
The second bullet used the remaining oxygen in the air to create a dust explosion.
Normally you would need a somewhat enclosed space to create one due to pressure but that was already fixed by preset harmless bounded fields that were ignored by Hector as despite spotting them in favor breaking out of an encirclement he thought he should just power through them.
This might have taken a lot of words to explain but these events had actually happened in the mere span of a mere three seconds.
The shockwave was so great that it reached even Alicia who was nearly a hundred meters away from the explosion, her body was thrown rolling backward as though she was a fly that was just swatted away from a person's palm.
She rolled until her back hit the wall near the door she used to reach the rooftop.
"Whoa, that was unexpected." Suddenly a voice came from her left making her turn to see the enemy Servant covered in smoke and a strange whitish liquid as he held a black sword in his right hand and pink haired girl with his left arm who was coughing heavily in her fist, her body half covered with the Servant's cloak.
Before she could even form another thought the enemy was already swinging his sword to her neck but it didn't matter.
–her role was simply to ensure that whore could land a first clean hit right from the get go after all.
BAAAAM
Stopping his sword in the middle of his swing, he threw his Master aside as he quickly spun to his left side as a flash of light burst out of nowhere charging at him like a freight train.
The light and the man shot away at absurd speed, crashing from there all the way down through another building and stopping only after hitting the streets.
'Well, that worked out better than I thought.' Alicia got back up on her feet, looking at the girl that the man threw away to save her from the impact. 'Now all I have to do is deal with her.'
She didn't pick her rifle back up as it would just be a hindrance due to its unwieldingness for the current situation. Instead she reached for the gun holster under her armpit to retrieve a small handgun before pointing it at the girl.
BANG
***
BAAAAM
'What the hell!?' Hector was hit by flash light that swept him off his feet and barreled through an entire apartment building with him, blood and guts were visible in the corner of Hector's eyes for a second, likely the residents of the building they just made a hole through.
He crashed into a large pedestrian sidewalk before getting sent flying in the middle of the road making a street like that was on a traffic isle fall to the ground.
Despite the sudden attack he was still relatively unharmed as while a normal person would have been reduced to a pulp by such an attack he was capable of blocking it with just his sword.
"Well, damn, I thought I would surely get you there. And to think that the missy even gave me such a nice opening, what a waste." As the light faded a rough yet somewhat feminine voice started rumbling from the smoke.
"Well, I'm sorry for being such a party pooper then." Hector swung his sword and generated a gust of wind with the bare pressure created by his movement that cleared the air.
A very tall olive skinned woman with long pitch black charcoal like hair reaching down to her back and eyes of the same matching color emerged from the smoke. She rode on a chariot resting on top of a mass of rubble.
"No problem, just die and we will be even, no hard feelings." She wore a long sand colored cloak that covered her entire body save for her fairly toned and muscular forearm and hand holding on long pair of reins, the chariot she rode was made out of dark wood and leather that looked like pieces of rocks, drawn by two monstrous horses with deformed proportions that looked at Hector with feral ferocity as if they wanted nothing more than to turn him to shreds…
…And from the foam coming out of their mouth they probably wanted to actually.
'Heh. Now that's something I wouldn't like to experience again even if I didn't exactly personally feel it the last time around.' Hector laughed at the thought, briefly remembering what had allegedly happened to him after that bastard Achilles killed him.
"That's really nice of you, but it would be way too lame for me to just die like this, so why don't we just, I don't know, drink something, make peace and be friends?"
"Eh, why though? I feel like I'm being very generous here so why should I do something like this for you? You aren't even my type so I can't bring myself to be any kinder than this."
"Not your type? Where did that even come from? I'm not even asking you out." Hector laughed sarcastically at her with a faint smile on his face.
"In any case, as for why you should accept to stand down, well that's obvious–" His voice slowly flattened together with the smile on his lips, his eyes piercing straight at her, instinctively making her clench on her carriage's reins a little tighter.
"–Because if you don't then I am afraid I would have to bury you right here."
FLUTTER
As soon as Hector spoke those words the two of them were already starting their moves, her cloak opened in the front and she whipped out a dark bow, her other arm moved like blur and took an arrow from the quiver inside the chariot's cockpit and immediately fired it at him.
Hector on the other hand sprinted in a straight line at her with his sword in hand.
CLANG
He used his sword to deviate the arrow but as soon as he did another three were already right behind the first one.
CLANG CLANG CLANG
But Hector blocked all of them without problem as he grew closer to his target.
'Strange, why isn't she moving from her spot? Judging by the chariot she should be Rider, her biggest advantage should be her mobility, then why is she standing still? Is it a trap?' As he approached he pondered about the whole situation, they were already ambushed and the enemy probably had already devised some form of strategy to fight him whatever they knew of him or not which made him reluctant in this approach when his enemy clearly looked to be baiting him.
"NEEEIGRRRHGH." Then one of the two horses roared a neigh so loud it could break glass before spewing a sea of fire straight out of its mouth at the approaching Hector.
"Oh!?" Surprised by the horse's suddenly spitting fire he still didn't lose his composure and quickly avoided the rushing flames by jumping backward albeit losing the gained ground he had obtained.
FWUSH FWUSH FWUSH
Arrows came from the horse's fire bathing them in a mantle of flame as they quickly pursued Hector during his escape.
In response he simply moved to avoid them as well by leaping left and right as he moved back.
'And here we are back to square one.' Lancer's retreat brought him back to his starting position, no, actually he was maybe even a few steps more distant from his enemy then when they crashed down.
"Hey, hey, where the hell are you going? Are you afraid of getting a little burned?" The most likely Rider mocked from on top of her chariot, still in the same position as before as she fired a few more arrows.
"That's for sure, I don't want to die by being cooked alive to a well done steak." Hector quipped back humorously as he tilted his head to avoid the first shot and then hopped left and right to make the other miss as well.
'This is annoying, but seriously is that a horse or a dragon? I don't like this situation one bit. She stands between me and the building I left my Master at so I have no choice but to get past her and because she doesn't move away from there I'm forced to take the first move. Trying to go around her would probably only result in another sneak attack.'
In this situation where he was forced to stand against an enemy while also suffering from both a lack of knowledge and a number disparity between the two forces, usually the first step to take in order to avoid a disaster would be to calmly buy time and exploit whatever little advantage one could leverage to slowly turn things around.
Especially so when your enemy clearly had aces up their sleeves. For example Rider was on top of her chariot but didn't take any attempts at using it to leverage the advantage it would bring her in a fight against an enemy on foot and that despite neither the chariot nor the horses seemingly to be in any bad condition after her previous charge.
On the contrary she was actually holding the horses back by their reins to stop them from rushing ahead.
All these things put together made Hector, who was already a very untrusting person by himself, think over his actions over and over again. Somehow despite this being a situation he faced many times in his life he felt like he was somehow being strangely discombobulated by this ambush.
Many thoughts swirled in his mind in an attempt at calculating the multiple possibilities for a way out but they all didn't look very promising for either one reason or another.
However.
'I cannot afford to waste too much time even if it's a trap, my Master has the number disadvantage and I didn't succeed in killing that woman before and there is this strange liquid that has been sticking on me ever since I bisected that first guy. I have to regroup with my Master as soon as possible.'
Rider continued firing arrow after arrow and the flames breathed by that one horse were starting to interfere too much with the surroundings in an unfavorable way for Hector.
'I guess I have got no choice, otherwise things will only get worse for me.'
"Hey."
He ignored all the insecurities that afflicted his mind.
"Is annoying me from a distance and sneak attacks the best you can do?"
"And?" She asked back, smiling mockingly. "So what if that is the case? Are you gonna cry?"
"Nah, I'd laugh though."
He smiled back, his mind wondering for but an instant to reminisce about a memory from the past.
"Because I'm definitely much better than you at both."
Shifting his sword from his right to his left hand Hector suddenly crouched so low his face nearly touched the ground before he fired off like a bullet, he powered through the arrows that came for him by shielding himself with his right arm and immediately reached the hellish sea of flames that surrounded Rider.
The fire spewing horse renewed his efforts and tried to up his heat even further as he started emitting at an even greater intensity than before.
Hector was engulfed by the flooding fire like a moth getting drawn by the flame.
But it was all for naught.
FWING
The sea of fire suddenly split in half like the Red sea.
He had cut the sea of fire in two with a single swing of his sword
From the chasm Hector bolted like thunder towards Rider, closing the distance between the two of them in the blink of an eye.
Rider didn't even attempt to retreat, instead with her free hand she quickly unsheathed a short blade from under her cloak, it was a golden short sword with a leaf shaped blade.
CLANG
The two blades clashed creating sparks of light in the air as Rider was forced to take half a step back while still on her chariot, Hector landed with both feet on the cockpit's railing already preparing another attack toward his enemy. Meanwhile Rider's bow changed place with a wooden shield.
She tried to bash Hector away from her chariot with her shield but Hector's sword cut the upper half of the shield in half like a hot knife cutting through butter, barely missing her arm and face by a hair's breadth.
FWUSH CLANG FWUSH FWUSH CLANG
Hector tried to hack at her with his sword multiple times but she either avoided his blows or responded in kind with her short sword and a curve knife she brought out in place of her broken shield to block his attacks.
CLANG BUNK GLANG GLANG BUKKK
Their weapons clashed again and again; Rider alternated between blocking Hector's attacks and aiming at his feet on the railing. Hector on the other hand despite standing on the narrow railing of a chariot that was continuously tilting around in place due to either their battling or the two mad horses, the Lancer's balance never faltered even once. His stance was low as he hopped from one point of the railing to the other while trying to stab or slash at Rider, moving his arm to attack with economic yet precise movements due to the restricted space.
'She's good… no, more than good. She is way too fucking strong.' Hector narrowed his eyes. His enemy was not afraid or necessarily at a disadvantage despite changing the contest from a long ranged battle to a close ranged one without breaking her composure, that arrogant smile still covered her face.
FWUSH
He swung horizontally, forcing her to duck. At the same time his foot shot forward, aiming to knock her off the chariot entirely. Rider twisted her body, letting his heel graze her cloak instead of her torso, and retaliated with a thrust of her leaf shaped blade aimed straight for Hector's throat.
CLANG
He caught it with the flat of his sword, but the impact pushed him backward, sliding out from the top of the railing. The moment his feet landed, the two hellish horses shrieked and lunged forward to tear him to shred.
"Halt." Rider hastily pulled on the reins to hold back her horses and just in time–
FWUSH
–as she barely saved her mounts from being beheaded by Hector's sword.
"I guess you weren't talking just to waste air, that was very sneaky, I shall concede it."
"Amateur." Hector spoke, quietly walking beside the chariot before stopping.
His foot now rested on top of the chariot's wheel.
"!" Rider panicked, she materialized a spear from thin air and swiftly used it to thrust at her enemy.
She had probably already realized her mistake, she had been concerned about stalling him and following her Master's instructions, she shouldn't have remained in place when she tried to save her horse, she should have charged at him.
But alas it was already too late.
"I told you I was better at being sneaky." His leg extended, kicking the chariot by the wheel and making it tumble over on the side thanks to its unstable position on the rubbles.
It was nothing incredible really, it would probably just take Rider an instant or maybe even less to recover; but from the start all that Hector was after was simply to get that one opening to reach for his Master.
And thus he wasted no time and immediately jumped away. His plan was to turn into spiritual form and quickly fly in his Master's direction in a straight line without delays. This way they will be able to at least regroup and organize a plan together.
However, just when he reached the highest point of his trajectory and was ready to dematerialize something unexpected happened.
'I…'
He hovered at the pinnacle of his jump, his cloak rustling in the wind like the wings of a bird taking flight as his expression twisted in bewilderment and horror.
'I cannot dematerialize.'
On a battlefield a single mistake could decide one's life or death, Hector who survived many times on the battlefield because of this but he also ultimately perished for this very reason.
'Shit.'
So he already knew what was coming his way right now.
It was the price of one's mistake.
BOOOOOM
***
HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Hope you enjoyed. Sorry for the delay.