Kazuma Satou shouted from the building across the street:
"Brothers and sisters, it's time to end this. Let's wrap this up!"
"Mm."
Kurisu Makise and her hidden companions nodded. Holding Hecate's Staff, which was as tall as they were, they walked to the edge of the battlefield,
commanding the special Dragon Tooth Soldiers to advance.
They surrounded Archer, who was supporting his broken leg.
"Ha ha ha..."
"Ha ha ha ha!"
Archer suddenly threw back his head and laughed. After laughing for a while, he slowly lowered his head and stared intently at Shirou Emiya in the distance, who had passed out from excessive exertion behind his companions and was being protected by them.
Those identical amber-brown eyes held neither hatred nor anger.
For an instant, they were filled only with relief, even carrying a trace of envy...
But no one noticed.
"Is he going to make a last stand?!"
Kazuma Satou was startled by his exaggerated laughter and hurriedly raised his bow.
But seeing that the other side made no move, he relaxed slightly.
Kurisu Makise had already ordered the special Dragon Tooth Soldiers to surround him completely.
With Dragon Tooth Soldiers at this level, given the strength Archer had displayed earlier, he could not break through so many layers of encirclement in an instant.
Kazuma Satou's plan had another benefit: it could prevent a final desperate counterattack.
Four of them had already gone down. Hachiman Hikigaya had even been in a team by himself; once he fell, no one could save him, and he was directly eliminated.
That meant five of them absolutely could not die, and Kazuma Satou, a fragile archer and the overall commander, was even less likely to risk going forward.
Because of the special nature of Mahiro Oyama's Craft Essence, she had not been allowed to participate in this battle at all.
On the upper floor of a building across the street,
Mahiro Oyama braced herself and supported Hachiman Hikigaya and Shido Itsuka to the window. The three of them leaned out together.
Seven people looked down from three completely different directions,
at Archer, trapped amid the Dragon Tooth Soldiers like a cornered beast.
Waiting for the final curtain.
Tokiomi Tohsaka: "Dragon Tooth Soldiers of this level are, in some ways, already as strong as some Servants."
Umari Tsuchima: "The items they pulled were absolutely crucial."
Sora: "No, they used and allocated them well. The power of an item itself also depends on the user's skill. When they first saw that item, did anyone really think of so many uses for it, or that it could play such a critical role?"
Dio: "Kazuma Satou, who decided on those methods of use, is impressive. The item itself is not important."
Illya: "So, it's over?"
Rin Tohsaka: "It's over."
Archer: "Yes. They did well enough. It's over."
At what was practically a hopeless moment,
he had experienced such desperate situations an unknown number of times in the past.
Archer lowered his head, closed his eyes, and his lips trembled slightly.
He began drawing a massive amount of mana from his "Master," while generating projected Noble Phantasms around himself to stop the pure-white Dragon Tooth Soldiers from approaching.
With his eyes closed, he looked as though he were recalling something.
Upstairs, Kazuma Satou closed one eye and watched through a monocular. He did not see anything strange.
He lowered the monocular, rubbed his eyes, and looked with the naked eye instead.
There still seemed to be nothing?
Wait? Tiny yellow-brown particles,
were rising around Archer.
This was... sand?
Kazuma Satou froze for half a second. Something was wrong... Where had so much sand come from?
This was the highly modernized New City Fuyuki, surrounded by buildings dozens of meters tall.
The ground was all asphalt. There might be a little dust in the wind, but it could not possibly be this exaggerated!
"Fall back! Fall back!"
He waved his arms.
Kurisu Makise was closing her eyes and concentrating on controlling the enhanced Dragon Tooth Soldiers. Her mind was completely overloaded, and she did not hear the shout.
On the battlefield, the edge of the rising sandstorm kept expanding.
It did not merely envelop all the surrounding Dragon Tooth Soldiers,
but also headed directly toward their controller,
—Kurisu Makise!
Blue Hero (4K)
"I am the bone of my sword."
Archer chanted with his eyes closed, and the disturbance around him grew increasingly intense.
"Steel is my body, and fire is my blood."
The specialized Dragon Tooth Soldiers could not approach for the moment under the barrage of projected Noble Phantasms. Although there were many of them, there was a limit to how many could surround him at once. They only needed to hold back the frontmost group.
"Get her out of there already!!!"
Kazuma Satou watched as the sandstorm nearly spread beneath Kurisu Makise's feet. In his panic, he slammed his palm against the window ledge.
If the distance were not too great and jumping down would not help, he would have leaped down already!
Behind Kurisu Makise,
Ryuguuin Seiya wanted desperately to get up, but he had already deactivated Viper Arts. Given the damage caused by his earlier overexertion, it was already a miracle that he was still alive.
He tried to forcibly activate Viper Arts' enhancement again, and extreme pain surged through him.
Threefold enhancement was no longer enough. He could not lift this battered body again.
Fivefold! Still not enough!
His overdrawn body needed more!
Sixfold!!
Eightfold!!!
When he activated it to eightfold, his body briefly recovered.
But the instant Ryuguuin Seiya stood up,
he fell backward like a kite with its string cut, collapsing back to the ground.
It was not because he could not endure the pain,
but because Ryuguuin Seiya's mind, without the Golden Fleece,
at the instant he forcibly pushed himself to eightfold,
had already begun... to collapse!
If he forced it any further,
he would not even need a second.
His mind... would die before his body did!
Ryuguuin Seiya looked at the unconscious Shirou Emiya, who had also overexerted himself. Shirou's mental state was not much better than his own.
Both of them had fought Archer for an entire day. From morning onward, they had been analyzing projected Noble Phantasms, and they had continued projecting until just now.
Ryuguuin Seiya closed his eyes. For the first time, his expression wavered as he bit down hard on his lip.
He was still... too weak.
A familiar sense of regret suddenly seeped from his bones, dripping into his heart like poisoned blood.
"Ah—"
The sigh in his heart seemed to come from a previous life.
"..."
"Yet those hands will never hold anything."
"So as I pray, Unlimited Blade Works."
Archer suddenly raised his head. Blue circuits like a net appeared across the ground around him, spreading out in an instant.
They did not merely envelop the surrounding special Dragon Tooth Soldiers, but also shot directly toward the red-haired, white-clad female magus!
Ciel: "Reality Marble? No, this is... a Sub-type of Reality Marble! A form of magecraft that rewrites reality."
Illya: "This is... a Reality Marble!?"
Illya: "Sigh, looks like this big sister... is going to be eliminated. I actually liked her quite a bit. I wanted to see what kind of interactions there might be between 'us.'"
Iskandar: "A pity. It is not a defeat due to lack of skill."
Saitama: "It was already exciting enough."
Esdeath: "I take back what I said. There are quite a few true warriors among them."
Aizen: "Perhaps there is still a turning point."
Zhu Xuan: "It should originally have been impossible, but because Kazuma Satou is present, it is highly likely to happen."
A-Xiu: "Wait! What is that...?!"
At the instant the domain was about to unfold and envelop everything,
a bolt of blue lightning flashed past.
The figure moved at an unimaginably swift speed, like a wild beast darting across the battlefield!
At the final instant,
the figure carried Kurisu Makise away from where she stood!
The ground where she had been looked as though space itself had been cut apart!
Archer and all the Dragon Tooth Soldiers around him vanished.
The figure slowly came to a stop. His movements gradually stiffened, becoming somewhat... numb.
"Cú Chulainn?!"
Hachiman Hikigaya barely recognized the blurry figure in the darkness and waved at him excitedly.
But "Cú Chulainn" did not respond.
He merely placed Kurisu Makise, who had suffered a headache from the backlash of suddenly losing contact with a large number of familiars and was temporarily unable to move, somewhere safe.
Then he returned to where Archer had been standing and simply stood there with his spear like a stone statue.
Rain suddenly began to fall across the battlefield.
Raindrops pattered against the spear-wielding figure, streaking down his body like splashes of ink.
"Hmm... What is this?"
Kazuma Satou looked at the figure. Could this be the blue lancer Kurisu Makise had mentioned, the one who had helped them escape Archer's clutches several times?
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