Mayuri hovered in the air, her rose-red eyes fixed on the man on the hill who should not have been there.
"Diarmuid."
Her voice descended from more than thirty meters above.
"Why are you here? And why did you help the King of Conquerors?"
"As far as I know, your Master and his Master shouldn't be on very good terms."
It was a perfectly reasonable question.
The relationship between Kayneth El-Melloi and Waver Velvet could no longer be described as merely bad.
Waver had stolen Kayneth's sacred relic and taken the King of Conquerors, who should have belonged to him.
Within the Clock Tower's system, that was enough to start a feud lasting several generations.
Now Kayneth's Servant had come running to take a hit for the King of Conquerors. No matter how one looked at it, something was wrong.
Diarmuid stood in front of the King of Conquerors, his two swords crossed, his stance unchanged.
His golden-amber eyes watched Mayuri calmly, and his face showed no intention of explaining.
"Why should I explain my Master's actions to you?"
His tone was ice-cold.
"If you don't want to be eliminated tonight, leaving quietly is your best choice."
Mayuri chuckled at his words.
"Is that so?"
Her voice lowered a little.
"Then I say the King of Conquerors will die here today. No one can save him."
Even as she finished speaking, Mayuri was already examining the two swords in Diarmuid's hands.
The red longsword had highly concentrated Spirit Origin fluctuations and strong offensive power. It seemed to seal within it some kind of guaranteed-hit effect.
Being cut by it would mean considerable trouble.
The yellow shortsword leaned toward defense.
Both were Noble Phantasms.
And both were powerful enough that they might pierce her Astral Dress.
The Astral Dress's passive defenses could block attacks below B rank and greatly reduce the power of those at B rank or above.
But against Noble Phantasms with special effects, the outcome was uncertain.
In his Lancer form, Diarmuid's red spear, the magecraft-piercing Gáe Dearg, could ignore magical defenses.
Mayuri did not know what effects were inscribed on the twin swords of his current Saber form.
If she kept fighting, she could be injured.
She could also be eliminated.
Mayuri quickly made her decision.
Thunder Sanctuary: Vulture Form circled beside her once and began to contract.
Its metal wings folded inward, its eagle head retracted, and its leonine limbs withdrew into its body. In less than two seconds, the entire structure reassembled in reverse, returning to its original spherical form.
The pitch-black metal sphere was roughly twenty meters in diameter, with reddish-gold arcs rolling over its surface like a black sun wrapped in lightning.
Mayuri moved toward the black sphere.
The instant her hand touched its shell, her Spirit Origin merged straight into it, as though swallowed by water.
Her black Astral Dress, pale golden hair, and four white wings all disappeared into Thunder Sanctuary's shell.
From the outside, only a pitch-black metal sphere remained above the hill, floating beneath the moonlight with electricity still flowing across its surface.
Mayuri was no longer visible.
This was the safest approach.
Thunder Sanctuary's spherical shell was the condensed form of all Mayuri's Spirit Power.
Piercing it required far more firepower than piercing Mayuri's physical body directly.
As long as an enemy's attacks were not powerful enough to destroy Thunder Sanctuary itself, Mayuri would be safe inside.
More importantly, merging with Thunder Sanctuary had not diminished her perception of the outside world in the slightest.
Her connection to Thunder Sanctuary had deepened, and every part of the sphere's shell could serve as one of her sensory organs.
Within a radius of several hundred meters, she could hear even a needle falling to the ground.
She could discern Diarmuid's and the King of Conquerors' positions, breathing, heartbeats, and magical energy fluctuations.
Thunder Sanctuary moved.
The first bolt of lightning shot from the sphere's surface.
This time, it was different.
It was not one of those precise, short-range lightning strikes, but a reddish-gold beam over three meters in diameter, extending from the sphere's side along a curved path like an enormous glowing whip.
A lightning whip.
The first lightning whip swept out from the left, tracing an arc across the platform atop the hill.
Wherever it passed, the granite ground melted straight into orange-red lava, and the air filled with the smell of ozone and scorched stone.
Just before the lightning whip reached him, the King of Conquerors set the Gordius Wheel in motion.
The two divine bulls roared, hauling the chariot into a sharp right turn. Purple lightning exploded beneath their hooves, driving the entire chariot past at an almost impossible angle.
The edge of the lightning whip grazed the curved blade on the chariot's left side. The metal reddened, then cooled again, leaving a warped scorch mark.
The second lightning whip struck from the right, the third from directly below, and the fourth from diagonally above.
Four reddish-gold whips of light, each several meters in diameter, swept around the hill together, turning the entire area into a cage of lightning.
Every sweep of a lightning whip had enough power to vaporize the King of Conquerors and his chariot together. Contact meant elimination. There was no other outcome.
But the King of Conquerors' driving skills were even better than Mayuri had expected.
The Gordius Wheel constantly changed direction through the gaps between the four lightning whips. The two divine bulls had an innate sensitivity to lightning and could detect changes in the electric field just before a whip changed direction.
Combined with the King of Conquerors' precise control of the reins, the chariot forced a path to survival through a lightning net that seemed to offer no way out.
The chariot tilted so far it nearly overturned, and Waver was tossed every which way in the back, but it simply would not get hit.
Diarmuid dodged even more easily.
With A+ rank agility and the combat intuition granted by his Eye of the Mind skill, he did not even need to wait for the lightning whips to emerge before moving.
When Mayuri controlled Thunder Sanctuary to release the lightning whips, he could read every warning sign: the changing arcs on the sphere's surface, where its energy gathered, and the rising concentration of ozone in the air.
His body began moving before the lightning whips shot out.
Occasionally, he swung his red longsword or yellow shortsword, using pulses of magical energy released from the blades to stir small air currents and adjust his direction at high speed.
He darted back and forth between the lightning whips like a leaf swept up by the wind.
Thirty seconds passed.
The hill was gone.
After repeated sweeps, the terrain for two or three kilometers around had been reduced to a charred wasteland.
All the trees had burned to ash, the rocks had melted and cooled again, and a vast sheet of black glass covered the ground, with many places beneath it still glowing red.
It looked as though the entire area had been bombed.
Yet she still had not hit either of them.
Inside Thunder Sanctuary, Mayuri exhaled.
Then she sent a thought through the contract.
"Master, do you have enough magical energy left? I want to use my Anti-World Noble Phantasm again."
In the study of the Tohsaka Residence, Tokiomi Tohsaka sat at the center of a magecraft circle formed from dozens of gemstones.
Each gemstone held magical energy he had accumulated over many years.
This was where the Tohsaka Family's jewel magecraft excelled: carefully saving energy in ordinary times, then releasing it all at once when it mattered.
"No problem. You needn't worry about magical energy."
Tokiomi Tohsaka's voice came through the contract, his tone as steady as ever.
"I prepared a large number of gemstones in advance that can temporarily replenish my magical energy."
"As long as you don't release your Noble Phantasm's final form, Caster, you're free to fight as you please."
Mayuri's rose-red eyes flashed in Thunder Sanctuary's darkness.
"Leave it to me, Master."
Thunder Sanctuary stopped its lightning-whip attacks.
The patterns of electric arcs on the sphere's surface flickered several times within a second. First, they all went dark. Then a deeper Spirit Origin radiance, one that did not belong to the lightning system, welled up from within.
The precursor to a Spacequake.
Then Thunder Sanctuary vanished from the real world, along with Mayuri inside it.
Riding the Gordius Wheel, the King of Conquerors fixed his amber eyes on the spot where the black sphere had disappeared.
This again.
Exactly like what had happened in his Reality Marble.
Disappearing, then returning, then...
Alarms blared at full force in the King of Conquerors' mind.
He did not hesitate. Not even half a second.
Releasing the reins with his left hand, he reached back and grabbed Waver by the back of his collar.
He hauled the boy from the rear of the chariot to the front.
Then the King of Conquerors threw Waver out.
Straight toward Diarmuid, just over a dozen meters away.
"There's no time to explain!"
The King of Conquerors' roar exploded through the night sky.
"Take my Master and get as far away from here as fast as you can! Hurry!!!"
Diarmuid moved the instant Waver flew into the air.
His golden-amber eyes had already read Waver's trajectory perfectly. He pushed off the ground with both feet, pouring all his Mana Burst into his legs.
The jumping power granted by his A-rank Mana Burst pushed his takeoff speed straight to its limit.
He caught Waver in midair, tucked him under one arm, and pushed off again the second he landed.
Every stride covered more than fifty meters.
Carrying Waver, Diarmuid retreated at high speed toward the mountains to the south.
The wind pressure was so great that Waver could barely breathe. All he could hear was the shriek of air being sliced apart.
The King of Conquerors stood in the Gordius Wheel's driver's position, watching Diarmuid and Waver rapidly recede beneath the moonlight.
He did not follow.
His amber eyes turned back toward the patch of sky where Mayuri had disappeared.
His great scarlet cloak billowed in the night wind.
Iskandar, King of Conquerors, stood on his chariot with his arms hanging naturally at his sides, facing the strike he knew would soon descend.
His expression was calm.
Five seconds.
Six seconds.
The spot where Thunder Sanctuary had been began to distort.
The second Spacequake.
Just like the first one within the Reality Marble, the boundary between heaven and earth was thrown into disorder, and the structure of space began twisting into a knot around that distorted central point.
Then came the black eruption.
The collapse of space spread outward from the center, leaving nowhere to run.
Several kilometers of surrounding terrain were erased within seconds.
Mountains, rocks, soil, and trees were ground to dust by space itself the instant they touched the boundary of the collapse.
Iskandar swung his shortsword one second before the wave of collapse arrived.
With that final strike, he wanted to carve out a tiny gap between himself and the wave of collapse, buying a little more time for Diarmuid and Waver as they retreated south.
But the force field created by his sword strike met that black front of collapsing space like a scrap of paper tossed into a furnace.
It blocked nothing.
The King of Conquerors' Spirit Origin began to disperse the instant the spatial collapse struck.
Golden motes rose from the surface of his body. His great scarlet cloak, his brass-colored breastplate, and those large hands that had once led tens of thousands of cavalry in a charge all became golden dust drifting upward.
As its master vanished, the Gordius Wheel lost the basis for its existence. The two divine bulls turned into fragments of purple lightning and dispersed into the night sky.
Iskandar, King of Conquerors.
The third Servant officially eliminated from this Holy Grail War.