Before she could understand how her opponent had done it, she felt the layers upon layers of defensive barriers she had so proudly set around her magecraft workshop all vanish in an instant!
"Wait—!!"
She tried to make sense of the situation, but gravity seized her first.
An immense gravitational force suddenly struck from below, like a fully loaded dump truck crashing into her body without warning.
—Bang!
With a dull boom, Flying Princess was violently slammed against the ceiling. Her carefully arranged Gothic Lolita dress instantly became a complete mess, its lace and satin torn apart by the fierce impact, while her once-exquisite silver hair scattered like dry grass.
And in that instant, she understood the situation.
She! From twenty thousand meters in the sky...
Was crashing!!!
"—Let us add a different sort of amusement to this increasingly boring world. Even madness, even the destruction born of folly, is fine. As long as it is entertaining."
This was the creed by which "Flying Princess" Francesca lived.
To her, the world was nothing more than a vast, tedious stage play, while she was the prankster sitting among the audience, always ready to throw a bomb onto center stage.
She had no need to reach the Root, nor did she need some omnipotent wish-granting machine. All she sought was the pleasure welling up within her as she watched noble souls struggle in the mud and order collapse into chaos.
For that "fun," she would stop at nothing.
She had specifically ordered the Magus originally meant to summon Saber to use the wooden box that had once held Avalon's Sword Scabbard as a Holy Relic. Her goal was not victory, but simply to see what kind of despairing, humiliated expression the lofty Knight King Artoria would wear when she was ravaged by