"Oh?" Jubstacheit's expression did not change. "Which of my failed products are you referring to? I've lost count after thousands."
"You should've reached an answer from your reaction." I nodded at his right hand, pressed over the left, concealing two fingers that had twitched a moment ago.
A small pause.
"...Careless of me." He didn't ask how I'd seen it.
"Boy, you're referring to the Lesser Grail we sent to Fuyuki for the Fifth War. If you're standing here with a Servant, that means she was defeated." Jubstacheit glanced once at Medusa.
"You're not asking about her status, whether she is alive or dead. Have you already reached a conclusion?" I asked, eyes fixed on his face.
"It was already expected. She was a failed product from the very beginning. Either she would lose in the war and die, or she would stay alive until five or six Servant souls were stored inside her, transforming her fully into a Lesser Grail." He explained, his shoulders broadening in an attempt to emulate human exhaustion, undermined by the perfect stillness of his muscles.
My lips stayed flat, back leaning slightly to get a better read of not just him but the area surrounding him.
"No reaction? Seems like you know about this too. Or maybe you've watched it happen yourself." Jubstacheit mused out loud, no question in his tone.
Behind him, from the back of his heels, very tiny white threads extended, shifting imperceptibly just above the snow, their color nearly indistinguishable from that frost beneath them.
He was buying time.
"Whether I've watched it happen or not is inconsequential. I'm here for something from you." I moved an inch leftward, closer to Medusa, blocking a falling drop of blood from his line of sight.
Blood was dripping down from Medusa's free hand behind her back. It fell on top of the snow, burrowing through and sliding till it met ground. Then, those drops expanded beneath the snow in a vague shape, which, if viewed from above, would look like an outline of a giant magic circle of blood.
[Blood Fort Andromeda]
We were buying time, just as he was.
"Everyone that comes here wants something from us. You're not unique in that department, boy. And my answer to all of them is the same." Those threads trembled faster now, connected to the Castle itself, whirring sounds echoing from somewhere behind him.
A low sound of snow sizzling resounded from behind me.
"And that is?" I shifted half my weight onto my back foot.
"If you want something, try to snatch it." Jubstacheit took a step forward.
"I don't need to snatch anything. You'll hand it over yourself." My foot tipped forward, moving toward him.
"Interesting. You think you've already won?" The whirring behind him escalated; even Medusa could hear it now, her fingers tightening around her stake-chain.
I did not reply and advanced.
Jubstacheit lunged forward when we were five steps apart, his arm cocked back for one precise strike.
A snowflake in the air melted.
Bang.
His knees buckled. Blood erupted from between his brows, shins slamming into snow and plowing forward before halting a step away from me.
A gun had materialized in my grip at some point and was dissolving into particles now, mixing with the smoke drifting upward from its barrel.
I looked down at Jubstacheit, a clean hole visible between his brows where the bullet had passed through.
His expression hadn't changed. Still calm, even as warm blood streaked from his forehead and pooled beneath him.
"Boy... You're smart. Much smarter than most people I've seen. You're observant too, terrifyingly so. But there is one thing that will always remain your weakness." Jubstacheit extended his arm up to his brow, fingers sliding over slick blood.
"And that is?" I crouched beside him, eyes not on him but on those threads extending from his body, oscillating visibly to the naked eye now.
"Information Asymmetry."
My fingers closed around a single thread as he continued.
"Do you know what I am? The Lesser Grail might have told you that I'm an ancient Homunculus. But this terminal was never the real deal."
I looked past him, at those threads still oscillating, cataloguing those whirring sounds that were connecting him to the castle.
A terminal. A body that spoke, thought and bled, but was connected to something larger. No fear a dying being should show either.
"You're not the one I've been talking to." I said. "Or rather, you are, but only a mouth of the thing I've been talking to."
Jubstacheit remained quiet. Quiet was an answer.
"The castle. You're the Einzbern Castle's intelligence. This body is just how it chose to interact with others." I looked past him, toward its spires.
His expression finally changed, an imperceptible fracture.
"Boy, then you already know what comes next." he said.
"... Fight the Einzbern Castle itself." I finished for him and looked ahead.
The castle had begun to shake. A fissure widened from its foundation with a quiet crack, right at my eye level.
Then another. And another, faster now, spreading in patterns my mind mapped without being asked to. These cracks ran in a deliberate, sequential pattern, not accidental failure, but a controlled collapse.
A groan rippled through the ground, displacing patches of snow to reveal fragments of the blood magic circle beneath. Windows across the upper floors began wrenching inward in clusters, glass folding in like lungs drawing breath.
I catalogued each structural shift as it occurred. First the chimneys. Then the pillars surrounding the east wing, bending backward past their structural limits before locking into new, unnatural angles. The adjacent pillars followed. Then all of them, in sequence, like fingers curling one by one into a fist.
My mind was still calculating the mass, structural tonnage, and physics necessary for a structure of this magnitude to move at all when the castle's front tore completely free from its foundation.
Windows kept blinking shut in irregular rhythm across walls that had transformed into something else entirely.
I looked up and confirmed my conclusion.
Two foundational pillars for hands, the front face of the castle as a torso, four rear pillars as legs. Chimneys functioning as exhaust vents, arches as pointed fingers, windows as heat circulation.
A mega-golem.
Constructed from a castle spanning hundreds of meters.
Medusa narrowed her eyes, hand twitching up on pure instinct to take off her glasses.
I rose to my feet and glanced at Jubstacheit's body beside me. His eyes were blank, the astute light in them extinguished, arms slack at his sides.
"Boy! Have you calculated an answer for this golem yet? For something entirely outside your database? Or are you struggling?" A voice eerily similar to his resounded from somewhere within that castle-golem.
"You're right. Information asymmetry is one of my only real weaknesses. I can't analyze and fight against something entirely outside my database or framework." I exchanged a glance with Medusa from the corner of my eye, accepting his words.
The golem took a step forward. The entire forest of frost around us quaked for hundreds of meters, trees flattening in a widening circle, snow punching upward and melting mid-air before falling back down as vapor.
"Yet, something being a weakness and being an exploitable weakness are two different things. It's only a weakness when you catch me unprepared. I might not know what lies ahead in this world. But I can still prepare for it."
I took a step toward it, hands once again tucked in my pockets, coat and hair whipping back from the shockwave of its stride.
Medusa followed in perfect tandem, her steps mirroring mine exactly.
The ground beneath us began to brighten with a crimson glow as she pulled her stake-chain back and hurled it into earth.
A closed red eyeball, with shut eyelids materialized above us, above even the giant golem.
Then—
Its eyelids snapped open.
A purple pupil with a narrow slit. The sclera of that eye brown and uneven, like a cracked stone wall.
Blood-red trails unfurled from it, expanding into a domain that painted the sky, earth, and everything in between crimson.
The Einzbern boundary field shattered like fragile glass, overpowered by the Blood Temple of Shapeless Isles.
Above us, that semi-transparent dome clashed against Blood Fort.
Below, the golem and I walked toward each other.
"You dropped your guard in our first exchange."
Pitch black markings rose from beneath my skin, pseudo-magic circuits stirring awake first time after the Grail War.
"Your terminal died in our second exchange."
The golem stood hundreds of meters high, each step it took terraforming the terrain.
I was 178 centimeters.
"If we follow the logical pattern... what do you think would be the result of our third exchange?"
No reply came.
He did not have one.
...
..
.
***
[200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter]
[5 chapters ahead on P@tr3on = [email protected]/Not_Aaryan]
...
[Blood Fort Andromeda]
Medusa's hidden setup technique. She seeds her own blood into the ground beforehand, forming a magic circle she can trigger later. It's the "prep" step for her boundary field, letting her absorb blood from any living beings inside her domain and convert it into usable mana, or apply debuffs on anything within her domain, like slowing them down, opposing another boundary fields effects, or generally giving herself and her allies advantage of having the terrain in their favour.
...
[Authors Thoughts]
I always wanted to write a golem fight. It'll be my first time writing a real fight against a giant, hundreds of meters large.
And another fight... here we go again.
Anyway, have an incredible day, everyone!