"This king takes the briefest of breaks, and you all whip up the atmosphere of a final battle without my say-so. Truly impressive."
Atop the flying Noble Phantasm known as Vimana, Gilgamesh lounged in the seat of honor, cheek propped on one hand, gazing down at the melee.
Beside him, Tokiomi Tohsaka was kicking himself raw. He had considered only the Servant's strength and forgotten to consider whether the Servant's personality, in life, would have meshed with his own.
When I asked you to stop someone from attacking the Greater Grail, you wouldn't move. Now that the other teams are tearing each other apart—where sitting on the mountain watching the tigers fight would be the obvious move—now you suddenly want to drop in on the show.
Forget it. If this brawl actually escalated to the Greater Grail, the loss would outweigh any gain. And if he could exchange even a few words with the legendary True Magic User, that alone would be a rare and valuable harvest.
Tokiomi Tohsaka consoled himself with that thought.
"So that is the Holy Grail. Let us hope it is not some shabby thing unworthy of this king's interest." Gilgamesh stroked his chin and brought Vimana lower.
…
"Boy. There are far too many regrets in this world."
Reality Marble: Ionioi Hetairoi, Army of the King. This was Iskandar's final card—a Reality Marble containing the tens of thousands of soldiers who had followed him in life. Each one counted as an independent Servant in their own right—no Noble Phantasm, no class container—and not a few of them were braver men than Iskandar himself.
"King of Conquerors. Truly worthy of an emperor whose name has echoed through the ages." Even after all his earlier reservations, Lancelot did not stint on his praise upon seeing a scene this magnificent.
"I'd actually meant to show this to Saber." Iskandar drew his sword and pointed it at Lancelot. "I admire you greatly, but to extend an invitation now would only come across as an insult, wouldn't it?"
Lancelot dropped into his stance. "Out of respect for you, once I have defeated you, I shall offer my praises to my King on your behalf. No—it appears my Master's Master would prefer you be left alive."
Feeling the Command Spell's amplification wash over him, and recalling the effects of the Command Spells those two were tossing around, Lancelot felt a rush of helpless resignation.
They might both have been a girl and a young woman, but their actions were honestly more unpredictable than even Kariya Matou's.
Iskandar laughed. "Now that is the greatest insult of all. I do not know whether your claim that the Grail is tainted is true, but apart from the final wish, isn't the entire charm of the Holy Grail War the chance to drink and trade blows with heroes from other eras?"
Mana clung to Arondight with no hint of diminished output, like a layer of clear ocean—reflecting on its surface the ideal the King of Conquerors had once chased.
The army surged past Iskandar and charged. Facing it stood an Anti-Army Noble Phantasm with no upper limit.
"Boy. We haven't really had a heart-to-heart yet, have we?"
"Why bring this up now?" The flag-raising tone of the question put a knot in Waver's stomach.
"Honestly. We've only spent a few days together, but a proper mutual understanding is necessary." Iskandar's gaze drifted to the blue light in the distance. "It wasn't until I saw a modern world map that I realized what I had been chasing all my life was a dream made of mist."
"'Let us go look upon the sea at the world's end.' That's what I told them. And a whole company of men spent their entire lives chasing something that did not exist." Iskandar set Waver aside and mounted his warhorse.
"Rider… do you regret it?"
"No. Not in the slightest." Iskandar charged.
…
"Here." Yimi pinched her nose and dropped the Grail unceremoniously into Ritsuka's hands.
She didn't want it anymore.
"Don't just throw it around. That thing has All the World's Evil sealed inside. You felt it too, didn't you?" Lord El-Melloi II had opinions.
"Can you handle what's inside it, Ruler?" Ritsuka looked down at the kitten.
"Probably?" Again with the wishy-washy answer.
Ritsuka mulled it over. The Luminosité Eternelle she had seen Lady Jeanne use—could it suppress, at least partially, the contamination of this world's evil?
"Ruler, what was that? Did you just redirect an attack meant for yourself onto an innocent person?" Saber, fully shaken by the warping power, gripped her blade but did not strike again.
"I don't follow, but if you don't attack, nothing happens, does it? This time we didn't attack you first. And surely you haven't still got it into your head that the Grail's contamination is some story we made up?" Ritsuka examined the Lesser Grail in her hands, comparing it against the one she'd seen at Chaldea.
She added, casually flexing: "We have absolutely no need for this thing."
"…"
So it was true. The girl was unmistakably a True Magic User in command of the Third Magic.
"You weren't exactly speaking honestly from the start either." Wasn't she the one who first claimed the Grail was hers?
Ritsuka ignored her and looked down at Yimi. "Ruler. What do we do next?"
"Mm… get it out first?" The kitten reluctantly took the Grail back.
This thing reeked.
She had separated it from Irisviel, yes, but the fact remained that it had absorbed mana from five Servants' worth before activating.
"So we still have to keep fighting? Are you sure you can resolve this, Ruler? Please give an accurate and confident response." Lord El-Melloi II sounded mildly defeated.
There wouldn't need to be more fighting.
Ding—
Under the kitten's light touch, the Grail glowed with brilliant radiance.
Irisviel realized something. "Are you trying to fill the Grail's required mana yourself?"
The mana needed to activate the Grail was an enormous figure. Not just any kind of mana would suffice, either.
But the Grail itself was the central instrument the Three Founding Families had devised to invoke the Third Magic. Topping it off with the infinite mana of the Third Magic was, admittedly, a bit backwards—but it was the most fitting battery imaginable.
"Iri, get back!"
A filth too foul to look at overflowed the cup's rim. A black-mud substance poured out and instantly washed over Yimi's child-sized shoes.
A stench only the kitten could smell saturated the air, and she dropped the cup on reflex.
At this point, no matter how much hope they had clung to, they had no choice but to face the truth.
Gilgamesh, on the verge of landing, abruptly braked. Tokiomi, who hadn't braced himself, nearly toppled overboard.
In the distance, Kiritsugu, observing through his sniper scope, let his hands go slack. The Grail itself—the prize he had been willing to sacrifice his wife to win—triggered, in that instant, a small fracture in the conviction he had armored himself in for years.
Kirei Kotomine, who had crept in to watch the show, instead curled a faint and unsettling smile across his face.
"It can't be…"
Who could have imagined that the Grail they had all entrusted their wishes to was something like this? Even with his five senses sealed off, simply standing near it brought obvious revulsion.
Saber squeezed her eyes shut in pain and threw herself in front of Irisviel to shield her from the black mud's spread. "Ruler, destroy it now!"
This thing wasn't going to be that easily destroyed. There was nowhere to even run to. Within ten minutes at most, the entire Greater Grail—no, the entire city of Fuyuki—would be drowned in this corrupting mire.
Splrch—
"Ruler!"
Hands—human-shaped but no larger than a child's—surged in dense waves toward the living beings on the ground, intent on dragging them under.
Yimi used Prana Burst to sever the foul claws reaching for Ritsuka. In the same motion she drove the Spear of Longinus into the mire—a sleight of hand that looked like she was releasing her key Noble Phantasm but in fact set up the activation of her true one.
"God is here with me!"