Fourth Interlude – That Night

Bazett stops. Tohsaka girl and her servant are waving at her.

Her servant was just over there, in the park, among all the others. He shouldn’t be here. He should be dead. Even if he survived, Lancer just rushed over there. In the worst case, they would be fighting. Why is he here?

Bazett clenches her fists as her survival instinct kicks in. She is against a servant and his master, alone. She decides to buy some time by talking as she decides what to do next.

“So you were watching me. I had wondered why you weren’t over there with your servant.

The girl opens her hands to the side as if to state it is obvious. She tries to appear in control but she fails. Her stance and slight shaking gives it away. She is tense. Weird. She has an overwhelming advantage with her servant at her side. She should be a lot more relaxed.

“Of course. With you two so obviously up to something, I couldn’t let you out of my sight.”

Her eyes narrow, and she folds her arms. Her servant is standing right next to her with an unreadable expression on his face. He looks healthy. He certainly doesn’t look like he got hit by Lancer’s attack. There isn’t even any signs of the battle he’s been in, or the wounds he suffered.

“However, I admit, even I did not expect such a cowardly attack from you. Leaving you aside, Lancer had looked like a more straightforward servant than that.”

If she was watching us, she must have realized beforehand that Lancer was about to use his noble phantasm. She might have warned her servant, and he ran. No, too fast, too soon for that.

“Nothing to say, then. Very well. Sten...”

She looks at her servant meaningfully.

“I know. Master to master, servant to servant, right? Okay. I prefer it that way too.”

He turns back and starts walking toward the other side of the bridge, toward the park.

“Be careful master.”

He vanishes with those words. Good. This is good. Lancer won’t lose to him.

And I won’t lose to this girl. Tohsakas… They use European jewel magic. Her father, Tohsaka Tokiomi, was a skilled magus. A respected gentlemen and an experienced, fire-type magus. She is likely to be a fire-type as well. I remember Kirei saying that she has high aptitude for magic, but she is young and inexperienced. She will make mistakes.

Such as this one. When you have an obvious advantage, you had better use it. Chances that you miss do not come back.

I put up my guard. I heard Kirei taught her after Tohsaka Tokiomi died in the last grail war. Yet her stance is off. Kirei never shows openings, but she is full of them. Even if she was taught close combat, she is still an amateur. And even if she is just hiding her skills, it won’t be a problem. I know Kirei’s moves, and I researched the magic Tohsakas use. At her age, she shouldn’t show me anything new.

She points her left index finger at me, and I move. A concentrated ball of magical energy passes from where I just stood. Two more follow it, but I have no problem dodging them. She won’t hit me with magic that slow.

They are gandr shots. A well-known weak curse from northern Europe. Normally, it causes the victim to grow weaker as if falling ill, but with such high density, these should also cause physical harm. Taking a direct hit from one of these would be unwise. But if she only uses gandr shots, this won’t take long.

I am right in front of her. If I strike now, she won’t have a chance to do anything else. Could it really be this easy? I make it seem like I’ll swing at her face and strike at her abdomen when she lifts up her guard. It does not connect. My hand touches an invisible, thin barrier between us. It shakes and makes a sound much like a glass panel. I did not realise it; I should have been more careful. Fortunately, it seems like it is just a defensive barrier. I don’t get shocked, my energy is not drained, and I don’t suffer from any other often-used counter effects.

She shoots more. When it is this close, it is significantly harder to dodge. So I block. She clearly has a lot of energy compared to the average, especially considering her age. The magical energy in her spells are very dense. However, it’s not like I can’t block such a spell.

I retreat blocking two shots and dodging some others. She keeps shooting even after seeing me block them. She either doesn’t have any other attacks, or is up to something. Maybe she is buying time for something.

Her barrier was simple enough. It might be effective against non-magus combatants, or mid to low lever maguses, but for me, breaking such a thing is not too hard.

We both stop and lock our gazes. I touch my palms to each other to activate the runes engraved on my gloves. My rune enhanced fists can break any barrier cast by any magus. Against the servant Caster, I would be doubtful, but I’m up against a master.

She starts chanting something. It is in German. I know German, but spells may have effects completely unrelated to their chants. It is better not to pay heed to the words so as not to be deceived.

Balls of Magical energy appear all around her. They have a similar feeling to the gandr curses she used. It looks like her spell is a large-scale, rapid-shot version of that. Then, I have just the thing.

Just before she finishes her spell, I pull out a scroll from my back pocket. Gandr curses approach. They are numerous, all with only slightly lesser power than their single-fire versions. Dodging or blocking all of them would have been troublesome. I swing my hand, the one holding the scroll, sideways. The scroll opens in front of me. I touch it with my other hand. The previously unseen runes written on it activates.

The scroll hangs in the air, still open, with bright runes now visible from even afar. All the curses her spell fired gets sucked into it.

“What!?”

She is stuck dumbfounded. Her inexperience is now showing. I involuntarily smile. That was only the first part, girl.

With a single wrist movement, I turn the scroll upside down. Now the side with the visible runes is turned towards me. I touch the scroll again. This time, the runes on the other side becomes visibly bright. The slightly different spell activates. All the curses she fired, all the curses the scroll captured, are set free. They fly back, right towards their caster.

She reacts faster than I expect. She pulls out a small green gem and throws it into the ground. She shouts “Gandr!” and a shield appears in front of her. The shield is simply shaped like the gem she used, only significantly bigger. It shields her from all the curses.

Now this is why one should not listen to their enemies’ chant. This shield clearly has nothing to do with its activation keyword. This might actually be a personal spell of hers. Creating new spells at her age… I’m impressed.

However, she is still too inexperienced. She watches as her shield stops those curses. She should have spent that time preparing her next move, or at least realizing my getting close.

My fist hits her shield at almost the same time as the last of the curses. It stopped the curses, no problem, but it does not do so well against a real attack. I rush her, scattering the shattered pieces of her broken shield. Her defensive barrier shouldn’t tank more than one punch either, and she can’t do anything when I am this close. I feel my fist connect her barrier shortly before reaching her. It actually manages to completely stop my punch, but that is it. It shatters just like her shield with my second strike. It barely managed to slow me down for half a second. Not enough for her to find a way out of this.

I aim my next punch at her undefended head. She tries to block, but her thin arms cannot even soften the impact. My punch hits her with enough force to shatter her bones, arms and head both.

…

Nothing happens to her. Instead, another barrier located right above her skin activates. It stops my strike completely, with no sign of breaking. Its shape is a square, two to two meters. Five other squares are connected to it and each other from the sides. It looks like an opened up cube.

The cube closes up, completely surrounding me.