Mayuri's face burned fiercely.
Her light champagne-gold hair hung over her shoulders, hiding the right half of her face.
The exposed left half was visibly flushed, red from her cheekbone all the way to her ear.
The wine had kicked in.
A Servant's Spirit Origin should not have been so easily affected by alcohol, and ordinary alcohol could hardly interfere with its operation.
But in her previous life, she had been the sort who could not handle a drop, and when her Spirit Origin reconstructed her sense of taste, it had carried that trait over as well.
One bowl of roughly brewed wine.
Just one bowl.
Her head now felt stuffed with a wad of cotton that was still slowly turning.
The King of Conquerors still stood there watching her.
His amber eyes held scrutiny, interest, and a little of the pressure that naturally arose when a king was openly defied.
Mayuri's mind worked a little slowly, but her mouth had already spoken first.
"King of Conquerors, I'll be blunt."
She set the empty earthenware bowl aside, its base striking the flagstones with a sharp clink.
"When it comes to grand principles, I can't outargue you. I admit that."
She said it without hesitation.
Mayuri had always known the limits of her eloquence.
She had not been good at arguing in her previous life either. Against someone like the King of Conquerors, who could win people over completely with a few words, she had practically no chance.
"So here's what we'll do."
She raised her head, her rose-red eyes looking straight at Iskandar.
"Once the banquet is over, let's have a fight."
The garden fell silent for a moment.
Those words carried more weight than anything she had said before, because this was now a formal challenge from one Servant to another.
"History has always been written by the victors. If I win, that will naturally prove you wrong."
Iskandar raised an eyebrow.
The smile at the corners of his mouth grew a little more pronounced.
"Caster of the Tohsaka Family."
The King of Conquerors spoke more slowly, as though turning each word over in his mouth.
"You would actually challenge me for this little girl, Saber?"
He tilted his head.
"Will your Master agree? Or can you make your own decisions this time?"
That last part was clearly a response to what she had said in the shopping district that afternoon.
Back then, Mayuri had said she would have to ask her Master about it later.
The King of Conquerors had told her then that she ought to have more of a mind of her own.
Now that she was openly provoking him at the banquet, it would sound rather ridiculous if she still had to ask her Master first.
The corner of Mayuri's mouth twitched.
Alcohol had considerably loosened her usual shell of indifference, making her whole face much more expressive than usual.
"My Master will agree. After all, dealing with you won't take much effort."
The atmosphere in the garden suddenly grew heavy.
That was no longer merely a challenge. It was outright provocation.
The smile remained on Iskandar's face, but something beneath it had changed.
"Who gave you the courage?"
His voice dropped, losing its casual, conversational tone and taking on the oppressive presence of the King of Conquerors when he grew truly serious.
The surroundings seemed to grow heavier all at once.
"To say such things while knowing full well that I am Iskandar, King of Conquerors."
Beneath the moonlight, his amber eyes made it a little difficult to breathe.
This was a king's instinctive reaction to being openly defied.
With two other kings and two Masters present, he could not let a Caster casually overshadow him on such an occasion.
If he failed to respond even to this, how could he continue to carry himself as the King of Conquerors?
Mayuri felt that pressure too.
Normally, she probably would have reined herself in a little. After all, letting relations with the King of Conquerors grow too strained now would do nothing to help the situation later.
But the wad of cotton in her head was turning so slowly that she could barely hit the brakes.
Her Spirit Origin reacted on its own first.
It was not something she consciously controlled. Rather, upon sensing the external pressure, her body's Spirit Origin core automatically activated its defenses.
Under the influence of alcohol, her Spirit constitution's control thresholds had also gone haywire, and it went straight to maximum output.
Spirit Power began surging wildly.
The air around Mayuri trembled, and a wave of Spirit Power spread out from her, far stronger than usual.
The cream-colored hoodie and dark jeans she wore quickly dispersed beneath the wash of Spirit Power, as though they had been replaced outright.
They had only been a hastily made disguise to begin with. Once her Spirit Origin entered combat mode, the higher-priority Astral Dress naturally took over first.
The black Astral Dress wrapped around her body once more.
Then came the wings.
The next instant, white light flared behind Mayuri. Two pairs of wings-four wings in all-unfurled from the interfaces on the back of her Astral Dress.
The white wings shone brightly in the moonlight. Fully spread, their span exceeded three meters, and a faint golden glow edged their feathers.
Everyone in the garden saw them.
Iskandar's gaze settled on the four white wings.
"It seems the King of Heroes was right this morning."
The King of Conquerors' tone shifted from oppressive to a more solemn appraisal.
"Caster, so your true identity really is an angel."
It was less a question than a confirmation.
Kid Gil sat to one side, holding a golden cup.
His red eyes swept over Mayuri before he lowered his head and took another sip of wine, his expression calm, as though saying that this king had known all along.
Mayuri stood beneath the moonlight.
Clad in her black Astral Dress with all four wings spread, her rose-red eyes shone distinctly amid the fluctuations of Spirit Power.
She, too, realized something was wrong.
Her Spirit Power running wild, her Astral Dress deploying automatically, her wings emerging on their own-none of it had been deliberate.
Clearly, alcohol had affected her Spirit Origin core, bringing its defensive mechanisms straight to the forefront.
She could barely think seriously now.
The cotton in her head had almost filled it completely.
Was she-drunk?
Drunk after one bowl?
As soon as that thought surfaced, Mayuri grabbed the two-liter bottle of cola sitting on the flagstones, twisted off the cap, and took a long swig straight from the bottle.
Cold liquid rushed into her mouth, its bubbles bursting all at once and jolting her mind considerably clearer.
Sweetness and cold flowed down her throat, cooling part of her stomach as well.
Mayuri's thoughts finally began to flow a little more smoothly.
Though she had not completely recovered, she could at least make normal judgments again.
At the edge of the garden, the two Masters reacted in entirely different ways.
Waver Velvet stood utterly frozen beside the hedge, his mouth hanging open for a long time.
An angel.
A real angel.
Not one from legends, Church texts, or illustrations in Magecraft history textbooks, but a living angel with four wings on her back, drinking cola.
Waver got stuck several times between "This is impossible" and "But it's right in front of me," and still failed to recover in the end.
Irisviel's reaction was a little more complicated.
She stood beneath the archway at the garden entrance, her long silver-white hair stirring gently in the wind raised by the Spirit Power.
Her wine-red eyes remained fixed on the white wings behind Mayuri as she mentally reviewed all the relevant knowledge the Einzbern Family had instilled in her.
Fuyuki's Holy Grail System was a Servant-summoning formula designed by the Three Founding Families, operating with the Greater Grail at its core.
It could not summon a complete angel as a Servant.
That much was clear.
The Holy Grail System could only summon Heroic Spirits recorded within the Throne of Heroes.
Angels were not Heroic Spirits.
Angels and humans were fundamentally beings on different levels, and the amount of information in their Spirit Origins far exceeded what the Throne of Heroes could contain.
Trying to fit a complete angel into a Servant framework would be much like trying to fit the ocean into a cup.
Thus, Mayuri was more likely an aspect or incarnation of some angel.
Unable to summon the complete entity, the Holy Grail System had taken a compromise: extracting part of the angel's Spirit Origin, using it as a foundation to reconstruct an incomplete but functional Servant vessel, and then summoning her into the present world.
That was the most likely possibility.
Of course, there was another possibility.
For example, an angel might have voluntarily lowered her rank to become a Servant.
But that was almost impossible.
At least as far as Irisviel knew, angels would not interfere with the human world without reason, much less voluntarily participate in a ritual like this.
She kept all these assessments to herself, saying none of them aloud.
Over twenty kilometers away, in the study of the Tohsaka Residence.
Tokiomi Tohsaka sat at his desk with his eyes closed.
The signals coming through the contract had been erratic for several minutes.
Normally, the Master-Servant contract was like a steady river, with clear flows of magical energy, mental contact, and information.
But at some point a little earlier, that connection had suddenly become intermittent, occasionally carrying emotions too vague to make out.
Tokiomi first ruled out injury.
If she had truly been attacked, the contract should have conveyed a clear danger signal, not these ambiguous fluctuations.
He thought back over the timing.
The anomaly seemed to have started after Caster drank that bowl of wine.
Tokiomi Tohsaka's fingers paused on the desktop.
Could his Servant be unable to handle alcohol?
Had she gotten herself drunk on a single bowl?