Kayneth El-Melloi Archibald.
Dust clung to his pale blond hair, and rubble had torn a gash in the left shoulder of his black coat.
Other than that, he was uninjured.
His face was taut.
It was the expression of a man whose workshop had just been blown up, yet still had to maintain his aristocratic dignity.
The mercury beneath his feet spread across the ruins, raising a silver platform of roughly three square meters.
Kayneth stood on it, his soles touching neither the rubble nor the rebar.
Kayneth took four glass test tubes from inside his coat.
Each was about twenty centimeters long and filled with silver liquid.
The liquid flowed slowly against the glass, sometimes gathering into small beads of mercury along the inner walls.
Kayneth pulled out the corks and upended all four tubes at once.
Once the silver liquid hit the ground, it quickly spread and merged with the Volumen Hydrargyrum already beneath his feet.
The total quantity of mercury surged. With the addition of the four tubes, the Volumen Hydrargyrum increased from over a hundred kilograms to more than seven hundred.
The silver metal spread across the surface of the ruins, covering an area nearly ten meters around Kayneth.
Kayneth closed his eyes.
"Fervor, mei sanguis."
Boil, my blood.
As the incantation ended, all seven hundred kilograms of Volumen Hydrargyrum moved at once.
The sea of silver metal shuddered, then divided into five units.
Three masses of mercury, each weighing roughly a hundred and fifty kilograms, took up positions in front of Kayneth, behind him to the left, and behind him to the right.
They formed three layers of automatic defense.
Each layer could independently detect heat sources, vibrations in the air, and attack trajectories, intercepting attacks from every direction in very little time even if Kayneth himself had not managed to issue an order.
The fourth mass, weighing about a hundred kilograms, separated from the main body, formed slender tubes, and extended beyond the ruins.
The tendrils crawled along the ground and walls, using their tips to probe for nearby heat sources, air currents, and fluctuations in magical energy.
The final mass remained in the platform beneath Kayneth's feet, awaiting use.
He was controlling five times the quantity of Volumen Hydrargyrum at once.
Kayneth could control even more.
With his dual-attribute fluid Magecraft, he could theoretically keep increasing the amount of mercury.
But adding more would reduce the precision of his control.
Against an enemy like Kiritsugu Emiya, who used sniping and assassination, defensive precision mattered more than quantity.
Five times the quantity was the amount Kayneth had settled on after calculation.
Besides the Volumen Hydrargyrum, Kayneth carried several Mystic Codes for actual combat.
A silver ring engraved with runes from the Age of Gods sat on the middle finger of his right hand.
It was a defensive conceptual Mystic Code that would automatically release a single magical cushioning shield upon physical impact.
Around his left wrist was an ordinary-looking leather bracelet containing a single-use short-range spatial jump formula.
There were also two magical energy crystals in his inner breast pocket.
Before entering the Holy Grail War, Kayneth had prepared a contingency plan for an attack on his base.
The same method should not succeed against him twice.
The reconnaissance mercury tendrils extended swiftly in every direction.
The metal tubes crawled along the ground, walls, and gaps in the ruins, their tips sweeping the surrounding several hundred meters like probes.
Three hundred meters away.
On the rooftop of a commercial building that had not been caught in the destruction.
Kiritsugu Emiya lay behind the low wall at the edge of the rooftop, his right eye pressed to the scope of an anti-materiel sniper rifle.
A Barrett M82A1.
Caliber: 12.7 millimeters.
Effective range: eighteen hundred meters.
At this distance, an armor-piercing round was powerful enough to penetrate the side armor of a light armored vehicle.
The crosshairs locked onto the figure standing on a mercury platform three hundred meters away.
Kiritsugu Emiya had been lying here for nearly three minutes.
When the Hyatt Hotel began collapsing, he had moved to this preselected sniper position.
The original plan had been to make the kill amid the chaos after the building collapsed, during the few seconds when Kayneth emerged from the rubble.
But Kayneth had emerged far too steadily.
The instant the building began collapsing, the man had activated his contingency plan, leaving no exploitable opening throughout the process.
Kiritsugu Emiya had intelligence on the Volumen Hydrargyrum.
Through internal channels at the Clock Tower, the Einzbern Family had obtained a personal file on Kayneth El-Melloi.
The section on the Volumen Hydrargyrum had been specially highlighted.
An autonomous golem Mystic Code.
One hundred and forty kilograms of specially prepared magical mercury.
Capable of automatic enemy detection, automatic defense, and automatic attacks.
Controlled through its wielder's dual-attribute fluid Magecraft.
Its defensive forms were divided into two types: membrane defense and spiked sea urchin.
But the intelligence had not mentioned that Kayneth carried four additional tubes of reserve mercury.
Nor had it mentioned that Kayneth could control five times the quantity at once.
Intelligence could not be trusted completely.
He still had to test it.
Kiritsugu Emiya's finger settled on the trigger.
His breathing grew shallow, his heartbeat slowed.
Through the scope, Kayneth's upper body rested slightly left of the center of the crosshairs.
Kiritsugu Emiya was not aiming at Kayneth himself, but at a point roughly half a meter to the left of his body.
It was the junction between two layers of automatic mercury defense.
This shot was a test.
Bang.
The 12.7-millimeter armor-piercing round left the muzzle at nearly eight hundred and ninety meters per second.
It needed only a little over three-tenths of a second to cross three hundred meters.
When the bullet entered its twenty-meter detection range, the Volumen Hydrargyrum's automatic defense activated.
In an extremely short time, the first defensive layer of mercury condensed into a silver shield thirty centimeters thick, blocking the bullet's trajectory.
The armor-piercing round's tungsten carbide core struck the shield.
It penetrated.
As the core passed through the first layer of mercury, it lost some of its kinetic energy and much of its rotational stability, but retained enough speed to remain lethal and continued forward.
The second layer of mercury filled in after the first was penetrated.
This layer was thicker and denser than the outer one.
Kayneth had graded the defensive layers, making them sturdier the closer they were to his body.
After boring a dozen or so centimeters into the second layer of mercury, the core was stopped completely.
The sound of deforming metal gave a muffled note inside the mercury.
Then the core was enveloped and sank into the silver liquid.
Two defensive layers.
The first had been penetrated; the second had stopped it.
Kiritsugu Emiya watched the entire process through his scope.
He had enough data.
A 12.7-millimeter armor-piercing round could breach the first layer, but not the second.
Kayneth currently had three layers of automatic defense deployed.
Even if the first two were penetrated, there was still a third.
Without a Conceptual Weapon or interference from Magecraft, purely physical ballistic attacks could not kill Kayneth.
An Origin Bullet could solve that problem.
Provided it hit Kayneth himself, and Kayneth was using Magecraft at the time.
The Volumen Hydrargyrum was precisely an automatic defense driven by Magecraft.
As long as an Origin Bullet struck Kayneth, the power of its Origin would flow backward through his Magic Circuits, severing and then reconstructing them.
The problem was that the Origin Bullet was loaded in a Thompson Contender single-shot pistol.
Its effective range fell far short of an anti-materiel sniper rifle's.
To hit Kayneth with an Origin Bullet, Kiritsugu Emiya had to get within a hundred meters.
Within a hundred meters, through the encirclement of three layers of automatic Volumen Hydrargyrum defenses and reconnaissance mercury.
Not now.
One second after firing, Kiritsugu Emiya abandoned his sniper position.
He left the anti-materiel sniper rifle on the rooftop.
The thing weighed over ten kilograms; carrying it would slow him down too much.
He took only the canvas bag on his back, along with the Glock pistol and several flashbangs at his waist.
"Time alter-double accel."
Time Alter activated.
The flow of time inside his body doubled.
His muscles began bearing the strain of moving at twice the speed, and every landing felt like a heavy blow to his knees and ankles.
Kiritsugu Emiya vaulted over the rooftop's edge, dropped down the fire escape on the building's outer wall, and landed on the ground after pushing off several times.
To an outside observer, the whole process took less than a second.
He started running.
Three hundred meters away, Kayneth located the source of the sniper round.
The reconnaissance mercury tendrils converged in that direction.
Twenty seconds later, the tendrils reached the commercial building's rooftop.
It was already deserted.
Only an anti-materiel sniper rifle and a single spent casing remained on the ground.
"He ran."
The corner of Kayneth's mouth twitched.
Quick to flee, aren't you.
The mercury tendrils continued expanding their search radius.
Kayneth himself descended from the ruins.
The mercury platform beneath his feet carried him between the rubble and the streets, gliding at close to an ordinary person's walking pace.
The three layers of automatic mercury defense remained around him without dispersing.
Pursue.
Kiritsugu Emiya appeared inside an office building two blocks away, moving rapidly along a corridor.
Double speed pushed his movements beyond an ordinary person's all-out sprint, and he could sustain it for a while.
The price was just as direct.
His body began to ache, and a faint red tinge appeared at the edges of his vision.
He did not flee in a straight line.
His route had been planned long ago.
Supply caches and traps were hidden in more than a dozen buildings within three kilometers of the Hyatt Hotel.
Flashbangs, C4 plastic explosives, remote detonators, smoke grenades, spare pistols.
These had all been placed during the intelligence-gathering phase before the Holy Grail War began.
Kayneth's Volumen Hydrargyrum had one difficulty when tracking moving targets.
Its main body was liquid metal.
In open ground, mercury could flow at high speed.
But inside urban buildings, corridors, corners, stairwells, ventilation ducts, and one fire door after another all slowed it down.
At every right angle, the mercury had to readjust its direction.
At every closed door, it had to squeeze through the gaps.
That was exactly what Kiritsugu Emiya was exploiting.
He rounded a corner in the office corridor, pushed open the metal fire door and rushed into the stairwell, leaped down three floors, then climbed out a window on another floor and landed on the neighboring building's roof.
Then he slid into the building through a ventilation opening.
Every time he changed routes, the mercury tendrils came just short of catching him.
Kayneth followed on his mercury platform, half a beat behind.
The mercury platform moved fairly smoothly along the ground, but following someone through windows, off buildings, and into ventilation openings was not nearly as convenient.
Kayneth's own physical fitness was not that of a combat-oriented mage, either.
Having him chase an assassin darting through buildings at double speed on foot was unrealistic.
He could only rely on the mercury tendrils to pinpoint the target's position, find somewhere he could see his opponent, and then attack from range with Magecraft.
Kiritsugu Emiya turned into the underground parking garage of the third building.
He ran past rows of empty parking spaces, his footsteps echoing through the concrete space.
The parking garage exit connected to an underground passage whose other end led to a department store on the eastern side of Shinto's commercial district.
On the department store's second basement level lay his largest cache of C4.