The concrete pillars in the underground parking garage flashed past Kiritsugu Emiya's eyes, one after another.
His breathing was already ragged.
A rusty taste filled his windpipe. The capillaries in his alveoli had endured double speed for too long and were beginning to leak blood.
Every joint in his body screamed. Each landing sent stabbing pain through his knees and ankles.
But Kiritsugu kept running.
The underground passage's exit was just ahead.
Behind him, Volumen Hydrargyrum's scouting tendrils had already reached into the parking garage entrance.
Silvery metal tubing crawled forward along the cable channels in the ceiling.
The distance was still shrinking.
Kiritsugu Emiya rushed through the connecting section of the underground passage and pushed open the fire door to the department store's second basement level.
He had arrived.
The department store's second basement level was an abandoned storage area, roughly eight hundred square meters.
Concrete pillars stood six meters apart, and long-dead fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling. The air was thick with dust and the smell of moldy cardboard boxes.
This was the largest explosive trap he had laid.
C4 plastic explosives were planted around the bases of twelve load-bearing pillars, at the joints of the ceiling's prestressed beams, and at structural junctions in the stairwell leading up to the first floor.
The total charge exceeded sixty kilograms.
Detonation was by radio remote control. The receivers had long since been deployed and tested.
Kiritsugu Emiya crossed the storage space, running toward the northeast corner.
There, discarded shelving and sheet metal formed a makeshift shelter, directly facing an emergency passage leading to the neighboring building's basement.
After detonation, he would withdraw through there. That was the plan.
He glanced back.
Volumen Hydrargyrum's scouting tendrils had already emerged from the underground passage's connecting section into the storage space.
The silvery metal tubing extended through the darkness like a glowing snake, the sensory organ at its tip scanning the space for living things.
A greater disturbance followed behind.
A mercury platform carried Kayneth in from the other end of the underground passage. Volumen Hydrargyrum shone with a cold silver light in the dim underground space.
Found you.
Kayneth's gaze crossed the entire storage space and settled on the figure retreating toward the shelter in the northeast corner.
Kiritsugu Emiya did not look back again.
Time alter-square accel.
Quadruple speed.
The flow of time inside his body abruptly accelerated to four times that of the outside world.
In that instant, every blood vessel in Kiritsugu Emiya's body felt as though something had forcibly rammed against it.
His blood pressure surged. Capillaries beneath his skin ruptured across wide areas, and patches of purplish-red bruising surfaced on his skin.
But his speed also rose to four times the limit a human could reach.
The distance from the center of the storage space to the shelter in the northeast corner was about forty meters.
At quadruple speed, Kiritsugu Emiya covered it in less than two seconds.
His body slammed in behind the sheet metal, momentum carrying him nearly another meter forward.
His right hand had already pulled the remote detonator from the side pocket of his canvas bag.
His thumb pressed down.
Twelve radio receivers received the signal simultaneously.
Sixty kilograms of C4 detonated in succession within a span of one hundredth of a second.
The second basement level became a ruin in an instant.
Shock waves pushed outward from twelve blast points at once, compressing into an almost tangible zone of overpressure within the enclosed eight-hundred-square-meter space.
Every load-bearing pillar disintegrated in the first second. Concrete shattered into powder, and rebar twisted out of shape.
The ceiling's prestressed beams lost their support and collapsed after them, bringing down the floor structure of the level above as well.
Fireballs battered back and forth through the enclosed space, their core temperature instantly rising above a thousand degrees.
The shock waves swept concrete chunks, metal fragments, and burning dust outward, crushing everything in every direction.
Within a hundred meters, everything that could be engulfed was engulfed.
Discarded shelves, cardboard boxes, fluorescent tubes, ventilation ducts-all were blasted outward.
With its underground support gone, the department store's first floor began to collapse in succession. The eastern half caved in within five seconds.
Kiritsugu Emiya plunged into the escape passage the same second he pressed the detonator.
Before the shock wave could sweep over him, his body gave out under quadruple speed.
Release alter-!
The instant he forcibly returned his time flow to normal, the backlash stabbed through his belly like a knife.
His vision flashed white, then turned red, then darkened.
His right quadriceps gave out completely. He practically crawled into the escape passage, dragging his crippled leg behind him.
The tail end of the shock wave swept past from behind, and the heat scorched several holes into the back of his black coat.
Several cracks appeared in the escape passage's concrete walls from the shock, but they did not collapse.
Kiritsugu Emiya crawled about twenty meters down the passage before stopping, resting the back of his head against the wall and gasping for breath.
He coughed, and a trickle of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth.
Kayneth was not necessarily dead.
With Volumen Hydrargyrum's defenses and the Mystic Codes Kayneth wore, he could indeed have survived sixty kilograms of C4 detonating in an enclosed space.
Kiritsugu Emiya did not go back to check.
Going back to confirm was something only amateur killers did.
If the target was still alive, going back meant throwing his life away.
If the target was dead, it made no difference whether he went back.
He crawled out the other end of the escape passage into the neighboring building's basement.
This building was farther from the center of the explosion. Its main structure remained relatively intact, though many cracks had appeared in the walls, and fragments of concrete were still falling from the ceiling.
Dragging his crippled leg, Kiritsugu Emiya crawled up the basement stairs to the first floor.
Half a floor's worth of exterior wall had collapsed from the shock wave, and moonlight shone through the opening.
He found a reasonably concealed corner behind a pile of overturned office desks and squeezed himself into it.
There were still medical supplies in his canvas bag.
He tore open a package of hemostatic bandages and began treating his right leg.
After a simple bandaging job, he pulled the Thompson Contender from the very bottom of his canvas bag.
A single-shot hunting pistol.
An Origin Bullet was loaded in its chamber.
If Kayneth was still alive, this was what he would have to rely on next.
He leaned behind the collapsed office desks, controlling his breathing and listening closely for sounds outside.
About a minute and a half passed.
A sound came from the distance.
It came from the department store's ruins.
The sound of metal striking concrete.
Dull impacts, with a sense of liquid flowing.
Mercury was battering the ruins.
Then came an angry human voice.
He could not make out what was being shouted, but he could feel the fury without hearing the words.
It was someone with strong self-respect who, after suffering one setback after another, could finally no longer contain himself.
Kayneth was still alive.
Kiritsugu Emiya closed his eyes briefly and pushed that news down.
If he was alive, this battle was not over.
The Origin Bullet. A range of under a hundred meters.
The Thompson Contender was single-shot. There would be only one chance.
The disturbance from the ruins continued for another thirty seconds before falling silent.
Kayneth had regained his composure.
Or rather, he thought he had regained his composure.
In fact, his hands were still trembling slightly.
That was the adrenaline from his surge of anger, not yet fully subsided.
Kayneth stood in the center of the department store's ruins.
The surroundings were beyond any description of devastation.
The underground space within a hundred-meter radius had been utterly destroyed, and the eastern half of the ground floor had collapsed into a huge crater.
Smoke still rose from the ruins, and the exposed concrete surfaces had been scorched black by the heat.
The Volumen Hydrargyrum beneath his feet was down to roughly a third of its original amount.
Of seven hundred kilograms of mercury, nearly five hundred kilograms had been blasted away.
Most of it had gone into forming a high-density defensive sphere that enclosed him completely.
Under the combined impact of overpressure and extreme heat, the outer layer had evaporated and been blasted away, while the middle layer had been compressed out of shape.
Only the innermost layer had kept Kayneth's body safe.
Now roughly two hundred kilograms remained.
It was usable, but already stretched very thin.
Kayneth separated a small mass of about twenty kilograms of mercury to remake the scouting tendrils and spread them in every direction.
At the same time, he took a magical energy crystal from his inner breast pocket and crushed it, replenishing part of his magical energy.
Volumen Hydrargyrum's scouting tendrils locked onto the target within thirty seconds.
The neighboring building.
The eastern section of the first floor.
The heat source was very weak, but still there.
An object at human body temperature was leaning behind cover, its breathing and heartbeat both on the fast side.
Found him.
Kayneth rode his mercury platform toward the building.
This time, he took an additional step.
He issued Volumen Hydrargyrum a new command: "Disable automatic defense."
The three layers of automatic mercury defense switched from autonomous defense mode to manual control.
The mercury still surrounded him, but it would no longer intercept incoming attacks on its own.
The decision seemed very risky.
But Kayneth had his reasons.
He had studied the intelligence on Kiritsugu Emiya.
The key to the name Magus Killer was not "killer," but "magus."
This man specialized in killing magi.
His killing move, the Origin Bullet, worked on the principle that if the target was using magecraft or magical energy defenses when struck, the power of his Origin would surge back along the Magic Circuits, severing the entire network before chaotically reassembling it.
Volumen Hydrargyrum's automatic defense was driven by magecraft.
If an Origin Bullet struck the mercury's defensive layer while it was automatically intercepting an attack, the power of the Origin would travel backward along the magical energy connection into Kayneth, directly destroying his Magic Circuits.
That was why Kayneth had turned off automatic defense.
In its place was another Mystic Code hidden inside the leather bracelet on his left wrist: a single-use, triggered defensive runestone preloaded with magical energy.
The defining feature of this kind of Mystic Code was that its magical energy was sealed inside during its creation.
When triggered, it did not require its holder to supply any further magical energy, and it had no real-time connection to the user's Magic Circuits.
Even if the Origin Bullet pierced this defense, the power of the Origin would find no path to Kayneth's Magic Circuits.
Kayneth reached the building's damaged exterior wall.
He saw Kiritsugu Emiya.
The Magus Killer was curled up behind a pile of collapsed office desks, in such poor condition that Kayneth nearly laughed.
His right leg was clearly injured, hastily secured with an elastic bandage. His face was gray.
Several holes had been burned into the back of his black coat.
Purplish-red bruises covered his skin. It looked as though something had gone seriously wrong with his internal blood vessels.
Just remaining on his feet was probably using up almost all this man's strength now.
Kiritsugu Emiya raised his right hand the very second Kayneth appeared in the opening in the wall.
The Thompson Contender's muzzle aimed at Kayneth, fifteen meters away.
He pulled the trigger.
The Origin Bullet left the barrel.
The .30-06 bullet crossed the fifteen-meter distance at more than seven hundred meters per second.
Just before the bullet reached Kayneth's body, the runestone on his left wrist triggered automatically.
A pale blue film of magical energy unfolded half a meter in front of him.
The magical energy sealed inside the runestone was released all at once, forming a temporary magical energy shield roughly half a meter square.
The Origin Bullet struck it.
The power of origin began severing and restructuring the magical energy structure the instant it touched it.
But when it traced backward along that structure, the trail ended at the runestone.
The runestone was an independent magical energy container to begin with, already disconnected from both its maker and its user.
The power of origin spun fruitlessly inside the runestone for a fraction of a second, shredding the stone's own structure until it scattered like powder.
Kayneth's Magic Circuits were unharmed.
The cost was that the bullet had lost only about thirty percent of its kinetic energy after passing through the runestone's defense.
The remaining kinetic energy carried it onward, driving it into Kayneth's right chest.