The communicator on his wrist crackled to life, and Romani's voice cut through the static, tight with alarm.
"Griswald, are you seeing this? Da Vinci's getting the readings now. That, that ring across the sky, it's not on any historical record of France in 1431."
"We see it," Griswald said. He hadn't looked away from it. He couldn't. The thing held his eye like a wound he kept pressing. "What is it?"
Da Vinci's voice slid in over Romani's, calm where his was frayed, though there was an edge of fascination underneath that Griswald was learning to recognize. "That, my dear pupil, is an excellent question, and I do so love a good question."
"Da Vinci."
"I'm working on it." A pause, the soft chatter of her fingers across some console half a world and several centuries away. "The bounded field data is coming through your spiritron link, but it's noisy. Whatever that ring is, it's saturating the entire Singularity with a low ambient charge. It's playing havoc with my instruments."
Ritsuka had her own communicator up to her mouth now, her amber eyes pinned to the same arc of light. "Is it a Noble Phantasm? Some kind of bounded field?"
"That's the trouble," Da Vinci said. "It reads like neither. The geometry is too perfect to be natural and far too large to be any conventional Servant's work. If I had to guess, and understand that I despise guessing, it's anchored to something at the heart of the corruption. Possible a Grail-scale phenomenon."
Romani made a low, unhappy sound. "Like Saber holding the Greater Grail in Fuyuki."
"Maybe?" Da Vinci said. "This is spread across the entire region. That ring isn't sitting over a single point, Griswald. Watch it. Follow the curve."
He did. He turned slow on his heel, tracing the pale band as it swept up from one horizon, over the impossible reach of the sky, and down to the far side. It didn't crown a city, tower or any single place he could march toward. It encircled everything. The hills, the woods, the river he could just glimpse glinting silver in the valley below. All of it sat beneath that vast luminous wheel.
"It circles the whole thing," he said. The words came out hollow. "The entire Singularity."
"That's what I feared," Da Vinci murmured. "I can't tell you what it is yet. I can't tell you what it does. The data won't resolve from where you're standing, and I won't have you walking into the heart of a corrupted France on a maybe. But Griswald, hear me clearly." Her voice firmed, lost its playful lilt. "If the opportunity presents itself, if you find a way to investigate that ring without throwing yourselves into a meat grinder to do it, take it. Understanding what it is may be the difference between resolving this Singularity and dying inside it."
"Understood," he said.
Ritsuka lowered her wrist for a moment and glanced at him sidelong. "We don't even know which way the Grail is."
"No," he agreed. "But we know there are people here. Cú said it himself, Wherever there's a Grail, there's a war being fought over it, and where there's a war there are people who'll know which way the bodies are stacking up." He scrubbed a hand back through his blond hair, pushing the loose strands off his forehead, and made himself breathe. One step. Then the next. "We find a road. We find a town. We figure out the date, the front lines, who's winning. Then we figure out the ring."
"Look at you," Ritsuka said, and there was something in it that wasn't quite teasing. Approval, maybe, half-buried under her usual dryness. "Giving orders."
He flushed. "I'm not, I'm just, thinking out loud."
"Mm-hm." She brought the communicator back up. "Doc, you copy all that? We're going to scout for a settlement, get our bearings."
"Copy. Keep your heads down. Da Vinci will keep working the ring data and ping you the instant anything resolves." A pause, and then, gentler, in the way Romani had of remembering he was talking to people and not assets, "Be careful out there. All three of you."
The line settled into a low background hum.
Griswald let his arm drop, and turned to find Mash.
She had drifted a few paces down the slope while they talked, and the dread had not touched her. Not yet. She had crouched in the long grass with the wind pulling at her hair, and she had her gloved hand cupped beneath a wildflower, a small purple thing nodding on its stem, holding it the way a person might hold a sleeping bird. She wasn't picking it. She was just looking. Watching the way the breeze moved it, the way the light came through the petals. There was a butterfly working the air above the next clump of blooms and her eyes tracked it, soft and unguarded, and the great terrible ring burning across the heavens above her went completely unregarded, because she had never in her life seen a flower grow out of the ground before, and that was the more astonishing thing.
Something in Griswald's chest pulled tight and ached.
He didn't have the heart to call her back. Not yet. Whatever waited in that corrupted France, whatever the ring meant, whatever monstrous thing they'd been thrown across history to face, it would still be there in another minute.
He came down the slope and lowered himself into the grass beside her, slow, careful not to crush the flower she was watching.
"It's a cornflower, I think," he said quietly. "Or close to one."
Mash didn't look up. "It's warm," she said, wondering. "From the sun. I can feel it through my glove." She turned her wide violet eyes to him, and the bright wet shine was still in them. "Senpai. Is it all like this? The whole world, before. Was it all like this?"
Griswald looked at her, and then up, past her, at the pale ring waiting in the sky.
"It was," he said. "And we're going to make it like this again."
Mash gave a single firm nod, the wonder banked but not gone, and pushed herself up out of the grass. "Then we should find this fort, Senpai. Before the light fades."
"Right." Griswald climbed to his feet, brushing the seed and grass from his trousers. "Da Vinci, you said there was a garrison nearby?"
"A fortified settlement, more like." Her voice came clear now, the static settled. "Cross-referencing the geography with period maps, there should be a fort roughly four kilometres northeast of your position, along the river valley. The terrain matches. If the Singularity hasn't rearranged anything, you'll find people there."
"And if it has?"
"Then you'll find something. Follow the river and if there is nothing there than we have more information about the singularity."
So they walked.
But Mash made the walking slow.
Not because she lagged, she could have outpaced both of them without trying, but because she kept stopping. A hedgerow heavy with white blossom drew her off the path entirely, and she stood with her face close to it, breathing it in, her gloved fingers hovering near the flowers without quite touching, as though she were afraid they'd vanish if she pressed too hard. A little farther on it was the river, glinting through the trees, and she went still at the sound of it, the rush and chatter of moving water over stone, head tilted, listening like it was music she'd never been told existed.
"Senpai look at those birds," she said once, hushed, pointing up where a pair of them wheeled and cut across the blue. "They are real ones." She watched them out of sight, and the smile that touched her mouth was so small and so genuine that Griswald had to look away from it, because something about it hurt to see.
"Yeah," he said. "Real ones."
He let her have it. They had time, or near enough, and the dread sitting in his stomach over that pale ring in the sky could wait a little longer while she met the world for the first time.
Ritsuka fell into step beside him while Mash drifted ahead, crouching every few dozen meters to investigate a beetle or a mushroom.
For a while neither of them said anything. The silence sat strange between them, heavier than it had any right to be, and Griswald realized with a jolt that this was the first they'd properly spoken since Fuyuki. Since the cave. Since the portal swallowed Olga and the sky came apart and the white light took them all.
He cleared his throat. "So."
"So," Ritsuka said.
"Bigger this time. The Singularity." He gestured vaguely at the rolling green spread of it, the woods and the river and the far hazy line of hills. "Fuyuki was, what, a city. This is a whole a county."
"Mm." Ritsuka kicked a stone off the path. "Feels different already. Fuyuki was all ash and skeletons. You couldn't walk ten feet without something trying to kill you." She squinted up at the blue, at the butterflies, at Mash a little way ahead with her face turned to the sun. "This is, like, pleasant. It's worse, somehow. Knowing what's coming. Knowing it's all going to be wrong underneath."
"Yeah." Griswald watched his boots eat up the dirt track. "Like the prettier it is the more it's hiding."
"Exactly." She glanced at him, almost surprised, and then away. "Exactly that."
They walked on. A bee blundered past between them, fat and gold, and Mash made a soft delighted sound somewhere up the path.
Griswald gathered himself. He'd been turning the words over for the better part of a kilometre and they still wouldn't sit right in his mouth.
"Ritsuka. About what happen. In the cave."
Her shoulders went stiff. He saw it, the small hardening of her, the way her easy stride locked up for half a step before she forced it loose again.
"What about it."
"About you being, about your body, back at Chaldea. About what you—" He faltered. "Romani told me. That you came back as a—"
"I know what I came back as." Flat. Clipped. She didn't look at him.
"I just," he pressed, gentle, the way he'd learned to be with frightened patients, "I wanted to know if you're all right. If you wanted to talk about it. Because what happen wa—"
"Griswald." She stopped walking. Turned to him, amber eyes too bright, jaw set hard against something underneath. "I'm fine."
"You died."
"I said I'm fine." A breath, ragged at the edge of it, and then she pulled her face back into something flat and unreadable, the professional detachment she wore like armor. "Drop it."
Griswald swallowed. The protest died in his throat, because that he understood. That he didn't understood.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. I'm sorry."
Ritsuka let out a breath. Her shoulders came down, fraction by fraction. "It's fine. You're, it's fine." She didn't turn around.
"Come on. Before Mash adopts a sheep or something."
"Fou would hate that." He mused.
So they walked, and they didn't talk.
The French countryside rolled out around them, green and gold. The river kept them company on the left, chattering over its stones. Poppies burned red in the long grass at the verges. Somewhere a lark went up singing and Mash stopped dead to find it, head tipped back, mouth a little open, until Griswald touched her shoulder and got her moving again.
The track widened. Wheel ruts cut deep into the earth, old and dry, the mark of carts that had passed this way. A sign that people lived here. Or had.
Ritsuka noticed it too. He saw her eyes drop to the ruts, then lift to the bend in the road ahead where the trees thinned out.
Above them all, pale and patient and wrong, the great ring waited in the blue.
Soon the trees thinned, then surrendered entirely, and the land opened into cleared fields gone to ruin. Charred furrows. Fences smashed flat. A cart lay overturned in a ditch, one wheel still turning slow in the wind, and Griswald felt the dread he'd been carrying all morning settle cold into his gut.
Then they crested the low rise, and they saw the fort.
Or what was left of it.
It had been defendable once, stone walls and timber gates, a squat tower at one corner with a banner pole jutting from the top. Now it sat broken open like an egg. Whole sections of wall lay scattered down the slope in tumbled blocks, each one bigger than a man, flung outward as though something monstrous had simply walked through. The tower had folded in on itself. Black scorching streaked the stone, deep and glassy, and the timber that hadn't been smashed had been reduced to grey ash and twisted nails. A column of thin smoke still rose from somewhere inside, lazy and obscene against the blue.
"God," Ritsuka breathed.
"Stay close." Griswald's voice came out thinner than he wanted.
Mash moved before either of them. "Senpai, get behind me."
She thrust out her arm and the shield bloomed from light, that great cross-shaped slab of metal larger than she was, snapping into existence with a hum he felt in his teeth.
And something else came with it.
A small white shape erupted from behind the shield in a puff of pink-tipped fur, tumbling through the air with a startled "Fou!" before landing neatly in the trampled grass.
Griswald's heart slammed sideways. "What the—Fou?"
"How—" Ritsuka had her hands half-raised, staring. "How is he here? He wasn't, we rayshifted, he can't have—"
Fou shook himself, fluffing his tail back into order with all the dignity of a creature who had not just appeared out of a Demi-Servant's weapon in the middle of a destroyed fort in fifteenth-century France. He blinked his big violet eyes up at the three gaping humans, entirely unbothered, and then trotted straight over to Mash and began rubbing the length of his body against her armored shin, purring out a contented little "fou, fou."
"Fou-san." Mash's composure cracked, panic edging into her voice as she crouched, shield still raised, trying to scoop him up with her free hand. "No, no, you can't be here, this is, it's dangerous, you have to—you need to go back, you need to stay with—" She got her glove around him and he squirmed free with infuriating ease, hopping just out of reach, looking back at her like she was being silly. "Fou-san! Please. Go with Senpai. Go with Master, he's safer, just—stay close to him, please."
Fou tilted his head. Considered her. Considered Griswald.
Then he gathered himself, tail lashing, and sprang.
Griswald barely got his arms up before a soft warm weight thumped against his chest and scrabbled up onto his shoulder, claws pricking through his uniform, settling there with a small satisfied "fou" right against his ear. The creature's tail curled around the back of Griswald's neck like a scarf, and he could feel the rapid little heartbeat, the warmth of him, that faint impossible thrum of old power buried somewhere under all that ridiculous fluff.
"He really likes you, Senpai," Mash said weakly, rising back to her feet.
"That's not—" Griswald reached up and steadied the creature with one hand, half-expecting him to bolt. He didn't. He just nestled in. "This isn't normal. None of this is normal. He shouldn't be able to—" He gave up. There were larger problems. There was always something larger. "Da Vinci, are you getting this?"
A long pause crackled over the link.
"I am looking at the readout," Da Vinci said slowly, "and the readout is telling me Fou is on your shoulder, and I have decided that is a problem for future Da Vinci. Focus, pupil. You have a destroyed fort and possible survivors. Activate your translators."
Griswald exhaled. Right. He reached into the inner pocket of his uniform and drew out the small device, a sleek disc of brass and crystal no larger than a coin, one of the handful of mystic codes Da Vinci had managed to slot into their gear before the rayshift. He pressed it to the hollow of his throat, felt it warm and adhere, felt the faint tingle as it settled against his skin. Mash and Ritsuka did the same.
"It hooks into your circuits," Da Vinci had explained that morning, brisk and proud. "Reads intent, renders speech. Crude, but it'll let you ask a fourteenth-century Frenchman where the Grail is in any language you need. Try not to lose them."
"Translators active," Ritsuka confirmed, tapping hers.
"Good," Da Vinci said. "Now go carefully. Mash, take point. Griswald, in the middle, where I can keep you breathing."
They went down the slope toward the broken gate, picking their way over scattered stone. The closer they got the worse it looked. The scorching wasn't from any siege engine Griswald could imagine. The blocks weren't broken, they were melted at the edges, glazed smooth like glass where the heat had kissed them. He stepped over the splintered remains of the gate, Fou tense and silent on his shoulder for the first time, and his foot came down beside a discarded helmet, crushed flat as parchment.
"Hello?" Ritsuka called into the ruin, her voice swallowed by the dead air. "Is anyone—is anyone here?"
For a moment, nothing. Just smoke and the tick of cooling stone.
Then a sound. A low groan, human, from beneath a half-collapsed lean-to against the inner wall.
Mash was there in three strides, shield braced, levering a fallen beam aside with one hand. Griswald scrambled after her, dropping to his knees in the ash.
There were people. A handful of them, sheltering in the lee of the rubble where the walls still gave shape. Soldiers, by the scraps of mail and gambeson they wore, though half of them no longer looked like they could lift a sword. Burned. Bleeding. One man had his arm crushed beneath a stone and the colour of his face told Griswald everything before he even touched him. A woman clutched a younger boy against her, both of them grey with shock, their eyes vacant.
The man who'd groaned looked up at them through one swollen eye, and his cracked lips parting in deep haggard breaths.
The man's swollen eye fixed on them, dragging up from Griswald's kneeling form to the strange cut of his uniform, then to Ritsuka, then to Mash standing armoured above them all with her shield catching the light. Confusion warred with the pain on his ruined face.
"Who," he rasped, and the translator turned the broken French smooth inside Griswald's skull, "who in God's name are you? You're not, your clothes. I've never seen such cloth. You're not from any company I know."
"We're travellers," Ritsuka said, crouching beside Griswald, keeping her voice low and even. "We came up the river road and saw the smoke. We want to help."
The man stared at her like the words made no sense, but he didn't have the strength to argue them.
Griswald had already gone somewhere else in his head, the place he'd lived in for two years of medical rounds, the quiet methodical place where a body was a problem to be solved one step at a time. He shrugged the satchel off his shoulder, Fou hopping clear to perch on a fallen block, and laid out what little he had.
The crushed arm was beyond him. He knew it the moment he saw the colour. But the woman's boy had a scalp wound bleeding bad and that he could do something about, so he pressed his glove to it and reached down into himself, into the thin reluctant current of his magecraft, and coaxed the bleeding to slow, the torn flesh to knit at the edges.
"Hold still," he murmured. "You're all right. Hold still."
The boy whimpered. The mother gripped him tighter.
Griswald moved to the next. A gash along a soldier's ribs, deep but clean. He packed it with cloth and willed the bleeding down, replenishing what the man had lost, drop by drop, the one trick his useless powers had ever granted him made suddenly worth something. He worked in silence, methodical, and the man with the swollen eye watched him do it through his one good slit of vision.
"You've a healer's hands," the soldier said. "But no priest's robes." He coughed, wet. "What manner of travellers carry no relics and dress like, like players in a mummer's show?"
"The eastern kind," Ritsuka said, with a small dry smile. "Far east. You wouldn't know it."
Mash had crouched too now, her shield dismissed, and she leaned in with that quiet earnestness she carried everywhere. "Please. What happened here? The English should not be able to cause this much destruction." Her brow furrowed beneath her bangs.
The soldier looked at her for a long moment. And then, against everything, against the ash and the blood and the dying around him, he laughed. A broken, barking thing that turned into a cough and brought up red.
"The English," he wheezed. "Oh, you truly know nothing, do you. You truly came up out of the east with your fine cloth and your healer's hands but you don't, you don't even—" He shook his head, slow, and the laughter died into something hollow. "King Henry's dead, girl. The English king. Dead. The witch killed him."
Griswald's hands went still over the wound he was tending.
"The witch?" Ritsuka leaned in. "Which witch?"
"Which witch, she says." The soldier's mouth twisted. "La Pucelle." He said the name like it scalded him. "They burned her. At Rouen. Tied her to the stake and put the fire to her she was ash, and we all thought, God forgive us, we thought that was the end of it." He spat to the side, pink in the ash. "And then she came back."
The little gathering of survivors had gone quiet. Even the wind seemed to drop. Fou's ears had flattened against his skull, and the fur at his neck stood up faintly, prickling with something that wasn't fear.
"Came back," Griswald repeated. His voice came out very soft.
"Out of hell," the soldier breathed. "Out of the fire they made for her. She must have truly been wicked if hell spit her and she did not come alone. An army of, of things walking out of the smoke with her. And they destroyed everything. First, Rouen, and then to Paris, and she put them all to the torch. Henry first. His whole court. The English, the Burgundians, the French who'd sold her, all of them, everyone who watched her burn and everyone who didn't lift a hand to stop it." He coughed again, weaker now, and his good eye drifted toward the broken sky where the pale ring hung. "She's burning France, traveller. Top to bottom. The same fire they gave her, she's giving back a thousandfold. City by city. Thousands dead. Tens of thousands. Whole towns gone to cinder, and her army just, just grows, every corpse it leaves behind."
Mash had gone white. Ritsuka's jaw was tight, her eyes flicking to Griswald, then away.
"You came from the east," the soldier said again, and now there was something almost pitying in it, something like grief for them. "You came toward it. God above, you poor fools. Everyone knows. There's no soul left in this country that doesn't know the shape France is in." His ruined hand rose, trembling, and he touched his forehead, his chest, each shoulder in turn, the slow sign of the cross. "The witch is back from hell with her monsters at her heel, and she means to burn us all the way they burned her. God help us. God help every one of us, because no king and no army left standing can."
Griswald used the last of his magecraft into the soldier's split ribs, sealing the bleeding to a slow weep, and sat back on his heels with sweat sliding down his temple. His circuits ached, that familiar dull throb of running them past what they were built for. He wiped his glove on his trousers and reached for the satchel to bind the wound proper.
Then the sound came.
It rolled in from above, distant at first, a deep beating thing felt in the chest before it ever reached the ears. A heavy rhythmic thud, like vast sheets of canvas snapping in a gale, layered over a low keening cry that scraped down the spine.
The survivors reacted before Griswald even lifted his head.
The woman clutching her boy made a noise he'd never heard a human throat make, a thin broken wail, and she was up and dragging the child by his collar before Griswald could move. The others scrambled after her, those who could stand, clawing over the rubble, abandoning the cart, the dead and each other in a stampede of pure animal terror. A man with a shattered foot crawled. None of them looked back.
Only the soldier with the swollen eye stayed.
He didn't run. He couldn't, and Griswald thought maybe he wouldn't have even if he could. He turned his face up toward that beating sound and his ruined features settled into something far worse than fear. A grief so old and so complete it had nowhere left to go.
"They came back," he whispered, and the translator carried it soft and toneless into Griswald's skull. "She sent them. She always sends them after. To make certain." His good eye slid shut. "There's no running. There was never any running."
"Senpai." Mash was already on her feet, shield blooming back into being with a hum. "Stay behind me."
Griswald scrambled up, Fou launching from the fallen block to land on his shoulder with claws digging deep, ears flat, that faint prickle of power crackling through the creature's fur right against his cheek. Ritsuka came up beside him, head craning toward the sky, hand shading her eyes against the bright wrong blue.
They moved to the breach in the wall together. Looked up. Looked out over the ruined fields toward the line of hills.
And Griswald's breath died in his throat.
They came low over the treeline,cutting the air with that thunderous wingbeat. It was the size of a bus, vast and lean and wrong, its body a sickly grey-green like spoiled meat, scales overlapping in dull plates that caught no shine from the sun. It had no front limbs, none of the four-legged majesty of the storybook beasts he read about as a child. Just two enormous bat-ribbed wings that spanned wider than the broken tower was tall, membrane stretched thin and translucent enough that Griswald could see the dark branching veins through it where the light came through, the silhouette of bones beneath. The hind legs hung beneath them, ending in talons the length of swords, curved and black and twitching. Long whip-thin tails lashed behind, tipped with a barbed point that flickered with each beat of the wings.
Its heads were the worst of it. Narrow, snake-blunt, more lizard than anything noble, with rows of crooked fangs jutting from jaws that didn't quite close, strings of saliva trailing back in the wind.
"Are you," Ritsuka started, and her voice came out very flat, very careful, the way it did when she was about to lose it, "are you seeing what I'm seeing."
"Yeah," Griswald said. His mouth had gone dry. "Yeah. I'm seeing it."
"A Dragon. A bus-sized dragon."
"Yeah."
"Just checking." She drew a slow breath through her nose.
Mash widened her stance, planting her boots in the ash, the great cross of her shield raised level with her chin. Her violet eyes had gone hard and steady, the wonder of the morning burned clean away.
"Da Vinci—" Griswald grabbed at his wrist.
"I see it, I see it." Her voice came tight and rapid over the link. "A less drakes Mash is right, treat it like a charge. Keep her between you and it and do not let it peel off to flank you, the drake will snatch you off the ground and—just don't, pupil."
The wyvern saw them.
Its head snapped down, that narrow snout swinging to fix the breach in the wall, and it opened its broken jaws and let out a roar that wasn't an animal sound at all. It was a scream. A long shrieking wail of pure malice that set Griswald's teeth ringing and made Fou hiss and flatten against his neck. The sound tearing the air apart at once until the whole valley shook with it.
"I take it back," Ritsuka said, very quietly, as the beast folded its wings and dropped into a dive straight at them, talons spreading wide. "I take everything back. I miss the skeletons. I really, really miss the skeletons."
Then the wyvern hit.
The world detonated.
The wyvern struck the breach with the force of a falling building, talons raking down where Griswald had stood a half-second before. Mash's shield came up to meet it and the impact rang out like a struck bell, a clean tolling note that he felt in his back teeth and the soles of his feet. The beast's claws screamed across the metal, sparks fountaining, and the sheer mass of it drove Mash back two full strides through the ash, her boots carving furrows in the dirt.
"Move!" she shouted, not turning, her whole body braced behind the cross of light. "Master, Ritsuka get to cover!"
Griswald didn't argue. Ritsuka's fist closed in the back of his uniform and yanked, and they went together, scrambling over the rubble toward the half-collapsed inner wall where the survivors had sheltered. He threw himself down behind a tumbled block taller than he was, Fou clinging to his neck with claws that drew blood, and Ritsuka piled in beside him, both of them pressed flat to the cold scorched stone.
"This is fine," Ritsuka panted, her back against the rock, eyes wild. "This is completely fine. We're fine."
"We're not fine."
"I know we're not fine! Mash dose not have her seman power up!"
Griswald did not what to call it that but they had other problems as he risked a look around the edge of the block.
Mash was alone with it.
The wyvern had pulled back from her shield, talons gouging the earth, and now it came at her again, low and fast, jaws gaping. Mash met it. She angled the shield and the snapping head glanced off the surface, fangs shrieking across metal, and in the moment its neck stretched past her she swung, a brutal overhand chop with the edge of the shield meant to crack the spine.
It wasn't there. The wings hammered down once, twice, and the beast simply went up, hauling itself into the air on a downblast of wind that flung ash and grit stinging across the ruin. Mash's strike cut nothing but smoke. She staggered with the momentum, recovered, planted herself again, jaw set.
The wyvern circled. Then dove.
And so it went. Griswald watched it from behind the stone with his heart in his throat, and there was a terrible rhythm to it, a pattern that turned his stomach the longer it held. The beast would drop on her, claw and bite, and Mash would block, the shield ringing, holding, never breaking. She was unbreakable behind that wall she held in her hand. Nothing the wyvern brought to bear could get through it. But every time she tried to turn defence into offence, every time she found a half-second and swung for the neck, the wing, the dangling vulnerable belly, the thing simply lifted away from her. Up out of reach, beating those vast veined wings, climbing into the air where she couldn't follow, and then it would wheel and come down again from a new angle, talons spread.
She couldn't reach it. It couldn't break her. They were locked, the two of them, and Griswald did the cold arithmetic without wanting to and didn't like the answer.
"She can't win like this," he said. The words came out flat. "She can't fly. Every time she gets close it just goes up. She can block forever but she can't, she can't end it. And it only has to get lucky once."
"So what do we do?" Ritsuka had her own head around the other side of the block now, watching, her face gone pale and tight. "She's just turtling, she can't—"
"I am aware." Da Vinci's voice was clipped, the playfulness gone entirely. "A lesser drake that won't commit is a war of attrition, and Mash will lose that fight. Griswald, you need to ground it. Anything. Bait it low, give Mash a window, I'm working the angles but you have to—"
The wyvern screamed and folded its wings and dropped on Mash again, and this time it didn't pull up. It came down with all its weight behind both talons, driving her to one knee, the shield groaning under the load, and its narrow head darted past the edge of the metal, jaws wide, fangs slick, lunging straight for the gap where her shoulder met her neck.
Griswald's heart stopped.
Then something slammed into the side of the wyvern's throat.
It hit with a sound like a hammer on a side of beef, a heavy meaty crack, and the beast's whole head wrenched sideways off its lunge, the strike to its windpipe and the fangs missing Mash's throat by a hand's breadth. The wyvern reeled, shrieking, talons tearing free of the shield, wings hammering to keep it upright.
For one wild instant Griswald thought it was a spear. A javelin, hurled from somewhere out in the fields, buried in the monster's neck.
But there was no shaft jutting from the wound. No point. Whatever had struck the beast had struck with the broad flat of itself, no edge at all, and even as the wyvern thrashed Griswald saw something trailing behind it, behind the thing that had hit it, fluttering and snapping in the wind of the wingbeats. A long banner of cloth, white and rippling, streaming back from the haft of whatever weapon had buried its blunt length against the dragon's throat.
A flagpole was driven into the monster like a battering ram.
"What—" Ritsuka started.
And then someone ran out of the smoke to fight it.
She came across the ruined field at a dead sprint, faster than any human had a right to move, and the morning light caught her and made her gleam. Silver. Polished plate, articulated and bright, banded across slim shoulders and forearms, a fitted breastplate that flashed as she ran, greaves flickering at her shins. Beneath the armor was a dress of deep violet, dark as a bruise, high-collared with puffed sleeves, and over it long cape-panels of the same purple snapped and flared behind her, opening at her legs to show dark thigh-high stockings above her greaves. Golden hair, long and thick, lashed out from beneath a silver ornament that rested across her brow, a great braid of it whipping over one shoulder.
Her face was finely made, soft and balanced, a small straight nose and a small set mouth and large eyes the color of the blue sky.
She reached the flagpole where it stood quivering against the wyvern's throat, and she did not slow. She seized the haft, vaulted, and used the planted pole to swing herself up and around in a tight arc, the great white banner snapping out around her like a wing of her own.
"Begone," she said, and the wind carried it clear into Griswald's skull, and she ripped the standard free of the wyvern's neck and brought it whistling around in a backhand sweep that caught the beast across the snout with the blunt iron heel of it and snapped its head sideways.
The wyvern shrieked and clawed at her. She turned the haft and the broad flag of cloth somehow caught the talon, fouled it, redirected it past her shoulder, and she stepped inside the swing with that same dreadful grace and drove the butt of the pole up into the soft underside of its jaw.
"Mash!" Griswald was on his feet without deciding to be, Fou tumbling from his shoulder. "Mash, now, it's down, it's grounded, hit it—!"
She was already moving.
Whatever the girl in silver was, she had done the one thing none of them could. The wyvern was low and reeling, its wings cramped against the broken walls of the fort, unable to climb, its whole malignant attention split between the soldier of silver in front of it and the wall behind it. It couldn't go up. There was no up. There was only the banner-bearer driving it back and Mash closing the gap with her shield raised.
The mystery girl saw her coming. The girl drove the standard up under the wyvern's jaw again, both hands, all her weight, pinning the head high and exposing the long grey-green column of the throat.
And Mash struck.
She came in low and hard and brought the edge of the cross-shield around in a flat brutal arc, and it took the wyvern across the neck where the girl held it stretched and helpless. A wet crunch of parting meat and cracking bone, than the great narrow head simply came away. It tumbled, jaws still working, eyes filming over, and the body collapsed in a heap of folding wings and twitching talons, black blood gouting across the ash.
For a moment nothing moved but the dust.
The wyvern dissolved. Not into golden motes like a Servant, but into a thin oily black vapour that boiled up off the carcass and frayed apart in the wind, leaving nothing behind, no body, no bones, only the dark stain on the earth where it had fallen.
Mash stood over the place where it had been, chest heaving, shield still raised, until she was certain. Then she let the breath go and lowered the shield and looked up.
The girl in silver had already turned away from her.
She planted the butt of the standard in the ash and let the great white banner settle, and she crossed the ruin with quick concerned steps, not toward Mash, not toward Griswald or Ritsuka stumbling out from behind the wall, but toward the survivors. Toward the soldier with the swollen eye, the one who hadn't run, slumped against the rubble where Griswald had left him. She knelt beside him in her gleaming plate, heedless of the blood and the ash, and she reached out with one gauntleted hand, her face soft now, gentle, the awful battle-calm melting into something warm and worried.
"Easy," she said, and the translator made it kind. "Easy now. You're hurt. Let me—are you—"
The soldier's good eye dragged open. Found her. Found the silver armour and the violet cape and the golden hair and the great white banner standing planted behind her against the sky.
And his face came apart.
His breath hitched, caught, snagged on something that wasn't pain, and his whole body recoiled back against the stone as though her outstretched hand were a brand. His mouth worked. A sound came out of him, strangled, choking, a wet rattle that climbed and climbed.
"W—" he got out. "W—"
"Don't try to speak," she said, leaning closer, reaching for him. "Be still, I only want to—"
"Wiiiitch!"