Three days had passed.
In that time, the city had undergone a complete transformation. Thanks to the "dragon feast" and Mo Wang's heroic deeds, the entire French army had gathered here. Morale was at an all-time high.
It hadn't even been a week, and Mo Wang had already united the French army and recruited all the available Servants. If this were a game, it would be a slow pace. But in the real world, it was terrifyingly fast.
If they had known where Jalter was hiding, they would have probably already cleared the chapter. Even Romani had to admit that Mo Wang's efficiency was frightening.
But now, it was time for the final battle. Three days had been enough for both sides to rally their forces.
"That's a terrifying army," Archer said, his enhanced vision allowing him to see Jalter's forces in detail.
An endless sea of zombies and skeletons stretched out before them. Above, a dark cloud of zombie wyverns blotted out the sky. It seemed that without Fafnir, the wyverns were no longer under Jalter's control, so the Marshal had just turned them all into zombies.
Mo Wang could even see the Marshal's signature sea monsters among the ranks. He wondered how the Marshal had managed to create such an army in just three days. Wouldn't he die of overwork?
"It seems the Dragon Witch is betting everything on this," Archer said to Cu Chulainn. Even in the future, an army like this would be a force to be reckoned with. And here in the ancient world, it was even more formidable.
If they were to charge, even with all their Servants, they would have a tough fight ahead of them. There was no way they could take on so many enemies at once.
"Damn you! I'm back!" Jalter hissed, her eyes fixed on the city.
The news that Fafnir had been butchered and eaten had reignited the flames of her vengeance, burning away her fear of Mo Wang. All she wanted was to storm the city and slaughter every last one of them.
"Kill them! I want to see this city wiped off the map!!" she shrieked, and her army of monsters surged forward.
The soldiers on the walls gulped, their hands trembling. Could they really stand against such a terrifying tide?
"Senpai, what should we do? Do we go out and fight?" Mash asked, her voice tense.
"Fight? Fight what?" Mo Wang said, a nonchalant expression on his face.
"Huh? We're not going to fight? Are we going to defend the city?" Mash asked, confused. Even with the repaired walls, they wouldn't be able to hold back such an army.
"Of course not. You don't really think I'm going to send these grunts out to fight those monsters, do you?" Mo Wang said, giving Mash a pitying look.
It wasn't that he looked down on the French army, but they were simply outmatched. Even without the debuffs from Jalter, a bunch of guys with medieval weapons couldn't possibly stand a chance against an army of monsters.
This wasn't Lord of the Rings. He had saved these people, not sent them to their deaths.
"Then... are we going to fight?" Mash asked, swallowing hard. She wasn't afraid to fight, but the thought of a dozen or so Servants taking on tens of thousands of enemies was daunting.
"Don't worry, I've already prepared an army," Mo Wang said with a thumbs-up. "Spamming units isn't their exclusive privilege."
"Huh?"
Before Mash could ask, Mo Wang leaped from the wall and landed in the middle of the enemy army, creating a huge crater.
"You bastard! How dare you!" Jalter shrieked, her eyes filled with hatred.
"Yo, long time no see," Mo Wang said, waving casually from the center of the crater. "You're looking well."
"You bastard—!"
Jalter's pupils contracted in fury. She slammed her banner into the ground, and black flames erupted around her. "How dare you show your face to me again!"
"Calm down," Mo Wang said with a grin, spreading his hands. "I'm here to give you a surprise."
"A surprise?" she sneered, her voice laced with a twisted hatred. "The surprise of me tearing you to pieces?"
Instead of answering, Mo Wang glanced back at the city walls, tapping his chin as if calculating the distance. "Hmm, this should be about right..." he muttered, then pulled out a crystal glowing with a faint blue light—the Core of the Herrscher of Ice.
"What is that?!"
Jalter instinctively felt a sense of danger, but before she could react, Mo Wang had raised the core high.
"Surprise—!" he said with a mischievous grin.
The core exploded in a blinding blue light.
Crack—
A visible wave of cold erupted from him. The ground instantly froze, and frost crawled up the legs of the zombie soldiers.
The nearest skeletons were frozen mid-charge, and the wyverns, their wings heavy with ice, fell from the sky like meteors. The sea monster's tentacles were frozen into grotesque ice pillars, and even the dust in the air was turned into tiny ice crystals.
"Wh-what is that?!"
The sudden wave of cold shocked even the people on the city walls. In less than a minute, everything within their line of sight was covered in ice. It was as if summer had turned to winter in an instant.
"Something... something has descended!" Jeanne's face paled. She could sense a terrifying presence, something that had arrived at the moment the cold wave had erupted.
Jalter had managed to block the initial blast with her banner, the flames of her vengeance hissing and spitting against the extreme cold. Through the shimmering curtain of fire and ice, she saw Mo Wang, standing in the eye of the absolute-zero storm, winking at her.
The space around him seemed to be frozen in time—zombies with their weapons raised, wyverns spewing poison, even the flying dirt was all part of a macabre, frozen tapestry.
"You... you lunatic..." Jalter's teeth chattered from the cold. She realized that her undead army was being turned into ice sculptures at a rate of hundreds per second. And the cold was still spreading, having already engulfed a third of her army.
"Even this ice won't stop me!" she roared, and with a wave of her hand, the flames of her vengeance melted the ice around her, freeing a portion of her frozen army.
But Mo Wang just gave her a chilling smile, as if this was exactly what he had been waiting for.
The moment the monsters broke free of the ice, Jalter realized something was wrong. Very wrong.
The once-rotting zombies now had strange purple markings on their skin, their bones twisted and their limbs mutated into sharp claws.
The skeletons' empty eye sockets now burned with a purple flame, their spines elongated, turning them into three-meter-tall bone beasts.
Even the fallen wyverns were convulsing, their scales falling off to reveal flesh coursing with Honkai energy, their wing bones growing into scythes.
"What... what is this?!" Jalter's pupils contracted.
Her front line had turned against her. The mutated monsters, screeching inhumanly, were now attacking their own side.
"Did Gilles's experiments go wrong?!" she thought, frantically creating a wall of fire to incinerate the charging Honkai beasts. But more and more were emerging from the ice.
On the city walls, Mash nearly dropped her shield. Purple crystals were sprouting from the ice, like evil plants.
And from these crystals, new, twisted creatures were being born, each with a blue ice crystal embedded in their foreheads. They moved with a mechanical precision, completely under Mo Wang's control.
"He... he's turned the enemy army into his own?!" Romani's holographic image flickered violently. "How is that possible?! Even King Solomon couldn't perform a Spirit Origin re-composition on this scale... Wait! What is that purple energy?!"
He stared at his instruments in disbelief. The energy Mo Wang was releasing seemed to have a will of its own.
"What the hell is this?!" Jalter shrieked. Every time! Every time he stops me!
She glared at Mo Wang, but he wasn't even looking at her.
"Emmmm, is this all the Herrscher Core can do in the FGO universe?" he sighed, looking at the ice core in his hand. The ice should have been able to freeze the entire region in an instant, and the cold should have been enough to kill all of Jalter's minions.
But it seemed that the Honkai's will was having trouble reaching this world, which was slowing down the conversion rate of the Honkai beasts.
"Tch, can't this Honkai be a little faster?" he muttered. "I guess I'll have to add something else to the mix. If Honkai isn't enough, let's add some Fragmentum! Come on, Stellaron, you're up!"
He activated another power within him, and the space around him began to warp.
ROAR!!!
Under the influence of the Stellaron, the zombies and wyverns were corrupted once again. Even more terrifying monsters emerged from the ice.
"That's more like it. Now this is what I call spamming units," Mo Wang said with a satisfied smile.
He was satisfied. But somewhere, a certain being who was trying to incinerate human history, and two little beings who were lurking outside the Root of the Fate world, were shivering in fear.
What the hell is this?! Where did all these monsters come from?! Please, for the love of God, stop! You're going to get us all killed!