Lancelot. First Knight under King Arthur. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Arthurian legend knew the name—because of his affair with Guinevere, Arthur's queen, the romance that fractured the Round Table and brought Britain down with it.
The radiance of Yimi's Divinity carried with it a compulsion toward calm, and perhaps it was that compulsion that now restored a sliver of clarity to the monster Mad Enhancement had warped Lancelot into. Unable to help himself, he pressed a hand to the helmet that shielded his head from every angle, and sank to one knee.
The black smoke of his Noble Phantasm—For Someone's Glory—dissipated, and his true face was exposed. The features Mad Enhancement had twisted into something snarling began, under her radiance, to ease back. At last he could think about the situation rationally again.
"So it's Berserker, then... For someone like me, ending up in a role like this is only fitting."
The rebar in his hand, which had been clashing with the Spear of Longinus a moment before, fell to the ground with a clatter. He looked at the child who had, only moments ago, been overpowering him, and couldn't help but laugh bitterly.
"Oh—my Command Spell is back. Is that one of Ruler's class skills?" Ritsuka waggled her hand. It seemed to mean she had three lives again.
The little cat who had just restored her Command Spell pointed at the kneeling Lancelot. "Master, I think he's surrendering."
"No!" Lancelot stood hastily, eyes closed. "Even under Mad Enhancement a moment ago, swinging a sword at a child is a violation of chivalry."
Every Servant summoned by the Grail had a wish of their own, and his wish might, in this Grail War, actually be granted—even if only to him as a Servant, rather than to him as the Heroic Spirit proper.
"Using fancy phrasing to wiggle into a ceasefire? This Berserker was definitely a fuckboy in life," Ritsuka muttered to herself.
"Fuckboy?" The little cat looked up at her Master, curious. This was a word she had never heard before.
Ritsuka gave her a simplified explanation. "You know, the kind of guy who's really good at making women feel special. In plain language—the kind who might be dating one woman while being in love with another at the same time, and... okay, I was just saying things. Don't take it seriously."
Halfway through, she registered the expression on Lancelot's face and realized that yes, running down somebody in front of them to a child was not exactly tactful.
"Meow?" The cat's ears twitched. She didn't quite follow.
"Are we not fighting?" That was all the cat cared about. The whole area was basically leveled already—why the sudden stop?
"If you want to keep going, I'd prefer not to raise a blade against a child, but in self-defense I won't just sit and take it." That was what he said, but the Knight of the Lake made no move to pick his weapon back up.
"The moment I saw her, the Grail stopped being something I had to take. I'm destined to leave this war in defeat—but I won't be dying at your hands, little miss." He finished in a tone that was, in fact, courteous.
"Then we won't fight." Hearing that he wasn't after the cat's treasure like the other bad people, Yimi lost interest in him. It was wrong to misjudge good people—the cat still remembered that she had once misjudged Master Ka-le.
"That's generous of you... Though I'm pretty sure we came out here in the first place because we were worried that Berserker would go after other Servants and speed up the Grail War's progress without us knowing?" Ritsuka lightly poked Yimi on the top of the head.
"Worried about speeding up the Grail's progress?"
The moment Lancelot expressed his confusion, another faint surge of mania rose in him. Without waiting for Ritsuka to reply, he suppressed the urge to attack the two of them—for now—and stepped toward the edge of the ruined battleground.
With the shockwaves from the fight spreading outward, Kariya Matou had been exposed too as the cover he'd been hiding behind was torn apart. Kiritsugu had been counting on Lancelot to keep Yimi tied up, and simply hadn't bothered with him.
Kariya was already unconscious. Even so, you could see the mass writhing under his skin, scuttling from his face down along his neck.
"This is your Master?"
"A foolish man, in some ways, but a man worth admiring." Lancelot lifted Kariya into his arms. "To overdraw his life force like this to supply me with prana—he has, at most, a week of life left. But a sacrifice this large made in order to save another—even if there are private motives mixed in—it's not my place, as an outsider, to say anything about it."
Even with the old worm dead, Kariya's body was already too far gone to recover. At this point the strongest attachment he had left to this Grail War was one final strike at that bastard Tokiomi before he died.
"To save another?" Ritsuka looked at the veins bulging beneath the skin of Kariya's face and found the image hard to reconcile. "So you were afraid that continuing to fight would kill your Master?"
"Something like that. Fighting while using up another person's life—even in my Mad Enhancement state, I was going to feel strange about it after the fact." Why exactly, he couldn't say, but this red-haired girl gave off a warmth that made him want to let his guard down and just talk.
"Please, leave this place. I'm about to slip back under Mad Enhancement."
"Even if you say that, the whole reason we came was to kill you because you're prone to losing control. ...Ruler, what are you doing?" Ritsuka noticed the little cat using her short stature to slip quietly next to Lancelot, then reaching up to grab at Kariya's Command-Spell-marked hand.
The cat was trying to see if she could take Kariya's Command Spells and give them to Ritsuka for extra lives—her earlier [Miracle] had only restored the one mark Ritsuka had spent, but honestly, she'd wanted to give Ritsuka a hundred marks right then for safety. It would have been even nicer if the patterns could have turned Ritsuka into a big orange cat (a tiger).
But the moment she made the attempt, it was Lancelot who felt his Mad Enhancement briefly hitch—and his contract, without explanation, transferred itself to Yimi, and his previously depleted prana instantly refilled to the brim.
"You?"
What Yimi had used to seize the Command Spells hadn't been the power of [Miracle], but the forced trade of the Scales of Injustice. Transferring a Command Spell was the kind of thing ordinary magecraft could handle—it wasn't a passive convenience like walking on water—so [Miracle] wouldn't activate for it.
Or perhaps it was the saint's way of reminding Yimi not to forget the lesson from the very beginning: don't be greedy.
"Urgh!"
A wave of disgusting worms came pouring out of Kariya's mouth, making Ritsuka—who had been standing close—step back several paces. That was every last one of the worms still inside him.
On the other side of the Scales of Injustice, Yimi had nothing to offer him as payment—but as the price for transferring the Command Spells, she could cast out the misfortune of this man's physical condition, expelling it from him entirely.
"You're awake?" Recovering from his shock, Lancelot looked at his former Master with complicated feelings, though he raised no particular objection to the switch. The truth was, the only person he could ever truly pledge himself to was Arthur.
And —
"Another round of suspected disloyalty on my record, perhaps—but in your case, getting your health back is the best thing that could have happened to you."
"Worth it... how?" Kariya panted, not following any of it. "You're Berserker?"
Even as his Master, he had never once seen Lancelot's true face.
He tried to issue a command to Lancelot and discovered that his prana—the whole of it—was gone, and with it the contract itself.
Why??
Damn Tokiomi Tohsaka!