"Oh-ho... boy. Ruler is supposed to be drawn from the soul of someone who died with no lingering wishes, am I right? Which would mean they'd have strong ties to the Church." The Conqueror King, hanging in the sky above, surveyed the two separate engagements below.
In a sense, the Holy Church at Fuyuki served as the arbiter of this Holy Grail War. Their authority to intervene, though, was actually fairly limited.
Waver stared up at him, baffled. "You should know more about that than I do. The reading I did never mentioned this Class at all."
"Which means the biggest wildcard in this Holy Grail War is probably Ruler herself." Rider's expression turned grave.
"Why do you say that?" Waver remained lost.
"Did you not see it? That little girl flicked out and then reeled back a humanoid figure. It had an antique set of scales in its hand. And then there's that spear. The moment it appeared, something about it bothered me. The color is unnatural—stained as if someone had poured blood over it. And it makes me... uneasy."
Some legends held that the Conqueror King Iskandar was the son of Zeus, which actually gave him a C-rank Divinity.
In a Holy Grail War, a Servant's true name was critical. The weaknesses of many heroes were written plainly into a single page of their own myth. Siegfried, for instance—bathed in dragon's blood, his defenses were extraordinary, but he had that one notorious vulnerability on his back. And a Servant's true identity could often be read directly from their Noble Phantasm. That was why Lancer had concealed his spear's appearance when he first appeared; without it, no one could identify him at a glance.
"Ruler's Class might be real. But that someone like that has been placed in the Ruler role—that's already the Holy Grail War's greatest problem."
The third phase of the Apocalypse.
"Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine."
"Why would a Servant like that..." Irisviel covered her mouth with one small hand, unable to accept it.
Saber, still watching the little girl's face, lowered her sword-tip. "My accusation that you were a coward interrupting another's duel was hasty of me. After all, you yourself are a knight who embodies injustice."
"So it's a Servant from the divine pantheon? No wonder she had no hesitation in antagonizing everyone present." Far away, observing from Chaldea, Dr. Roman swallowed hard. "So why does Ritsuka's compatibility summon something like that?!"
In Chaldea's current state, they had no way to observe the specifics of Yimi's Saint Graph.
The legends surrounding the Four Horsemen were sparse—a handful of lines in the Book of Revelation, prophecy only. No clear recorded true names. Even if she said her name aloud, no one would recognize it.
She couldn't be compared to a saint like Jeanne d'Arc. According to prophecy, the Horsemen were the ones charged with passing judgment on humanity at the end of days—executioners of the final purge.
In legend, the Horsemen and this spear weren't supposed to be connected. But the framework was already established. Could that spear really be—
Overwhelming prana coiled from the little girl's hands around the shaft of the weapon. No release incantation. Just raw Prana Burst, swung forward. In an instant, the empty lot Kayneth had so carefully picked out erupted into a hundred-meter sweeping slash.
"Flying Roundslash!"
The power was effectively on par with a Noble Phantasm. When Ritsuka came back to her senses, she realized she hadn't lost a trace of her own prana. If not for the contract still clearly intact between them, she would have thought Yimi had somehow switched prana supplies to someone else.
"Oh?" Archer, his scalp crawling with rage from dealing with Berserker, glanced aside.
Saber dodged the strike with practiced ease and brought her sword down the instant she'd cleared it. Her opponent didn't even bother to block. Even so, having already classed her as a formidable foe rather than a child, Saber didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second.
The blade carved past the small body. A thin white arc of light traveled onward through space, and at the far end of its path—somewhere in a pool across the city—a Western mob boss in the middle of an evening of debauchery suddenly came apart at the waist, splashing the woman in front of him with red.
"What the hell—?"
No matter how sharp her Intuition was, having already committed to the swing, she had no way to alter it mid-motion. Yimi grabbed the butt of her spear and drove the middle of the shaft straight into Saber's stomach, sending her flying. Saber hit the already-devastated concrete and tumbled several times to bleed off the momentum.
Feeling real pressure for the first time, Saber gripped her sword-hilt hard with both hands. "Master, I'm about to use my Noble Phantasm."
"In the name of my Command Spell: Saber, leave the scene with Iri immediately." Seeing her refuse, Kiritsugu burned a Command Spell without hesitation.
"Master—?"
Saber dismissed the invisible blade and swept Irisviel up into her arms. Driven by the Command Spell, she broke into a full sprint away from the battlefield.
"Hn?" The abruptness threw even Yimi off for a moment.
"No need to chase her, Ruler." Ritsuka finally caught her breath. "We only needed to drive her off. There's no reason to finish her and push the Grail War's progress forward. We can still try to negotiate with her Master later."
"Oh." Yimi looked up at the bull chariot again. In the corner of her vision, she noticed Lancer had already slipped away at some point.
"Asa—"
Then Berserker, seeing Yimi drive Saber from the field, seemed to snap. He immediately abandoned his attack on Archer, ignored his own Master's orders, gripped his iron pole, and came straight for Yimi.
"Stop, Berserker! Your enemy is Tokiomi's Servant!" Hidden some distance away, Kariya felt the insects inside his skin writhe.
"Hn."
Yimi met the charge head-on, driving the spear-tip toward Berserker's throat. The mad warrior's martial skill was, if anything, a touch finer than Saber's. Using the length of his iron pole to his advantage, he reversed his grip, brought the other end to meet Yimi's spear, and redirected the Prana-Burst-loaded strike into an angle that couldn't threaten him. Then he freed one hand to grab at her weapon.
Knight of Owner—given his Mad Enhancement and the sorry state of his Master, this was the only Noble Phantasm still usable to him. Its effect: anything gripped in his hand counted as a Noble Phantasm.
Of course, certain higher-tier enemy Noble Phantasms were off-limits.
Archer, whom he'd been harassing until a moment ago, showed a strangely calm indifference to being ignored.
Instead, he watched dispassionately. "Idiot. You mean to seize that thing?"
"A(san)hrrrrrrrr!"
The saint's blood soaked into the spear seemed to flow of its own accord, pushing back against the foreign prana trying to claim it.
"In the name of my Command Spell: return at once, Berserker!" Backed into a corner, Kariya spent one mark of his Command Spell.
There was no helping it. He'd never expected that, having summoned Lancelot, someone would turn around and summon the King of Knights and interfere directly with his Servant's behavior.
Kariya ground his teeth and limped off toward the Matou estate.
"All Tokiomi's fault. One Command Spell burned on the very first night!"
"Hn..." The small kitten, watching her opponent vanish, was thoroughly put out.
She'd suddenly realized that as long as the other side still had Command Spells, they could teleport themselves out of her reach any time they wanted.
Probably because she wasn't actually the arbiter of this Holy Grail War, she didn't have that ability the male voice had mentioned—the one where you could use Command Spells on other Servants. A pity. That would have been nice.
"I knew it, I knew it... so that's what it is. That spear was the one that pierced Jesus—how could Ritsuka possibly summon something like..." Dr. Roman was muttering to himself.
"How could this be? That Servant's stats are all E except for Mana and Luck!" Waver, slumped flat on the bull chariot watching it all, couldn't close his mouth.
Could they actually win against a Servant like that?
Without even using a Noble Phantasm, she'd forced two Masters to burn Command Spells just to escape on the first night.
Tap!
"Ow! What was that for?!" Waver clutched his forehead in pain.
"Excellent! Only a worthy opponent like this can rouse my desire to conquer!"