The study of the Tohsaka Residence.
Tokiomi Tohsaka sat upright at his desk, the fragments of five or six gems drained of magical energy scattered before him.
He closed his eyes and quickly sorted through his thoughts.
The King of Conquerors had already been eliminated.
Only four Servants remained in the Holy Grail War: his own Caster, Mayuri; Archer, Gilgamesh; Saber, Artoria; and Lancer, Diarmuid.
The greatest remaining problem was Archer-Gilgamesh, King of Heroes.
The Gate of Babylon held the prototypes of all manner of Noble Phantasms throughout Human History. In sheer number and variety of Noble Phantasms, no Heroic Spirit could compare to him.
But as long as they could eliminate Archer tonight, too.
Saber, the King of Knights, and Lancer, Diarmuid, would pose little threat to Mayuri.
Neither of those two Servants could surpass Caster in mystery or rank.
King Arthur's Excalibur was, of course, a supreme holy sword.
But however powerful it was, whether it could overcome Caster's trump card was genuinely hard to say.
An EX-rank Anti-City Noble Phantasm that could destroy a city in one strike.
Impossible.
Excalibur couldn't possibly be stronger than the Sword of Blazing Flame.
As for Lancer's twin demonic swords, they were even less of a concern.
Tokiomi Tohsaka reached his judgment.
"Engage her, Caster."
"Even releasing your ultimate Noble Phantasm is fine. Ideally, eliminate Archer tonight."
"Then no Servant will remain who can stop us from winning this Holy Grail War."
Inside Thunder Sanctuary.
Mayuri received her Master's instructions.
Which was stronger, the Sword of Blazing Flame or Gilgamesh's Ea?
To be honest, Mayuri wasn't sure either.
Ea-the Sword of Rupture.
An EX-rank Anti-World Noble Phantasm.
It was not the prototype of any hero's weapon, because it had existed before the very concept of a sword was born.
It was a Divine Construct, already beyond Human History.
Her own Sword of Blazing Flame was a stream of annihilating light formed from aggregated Spirit Power.
In Date A Live, how far this thing could go depended on the total Spirit Power accumulated within a Spirit.
Ever since Mayuri had been summoned, Thunder Sanctuary had been absorbing the Greater Source's magical energy from the atmosphere to charge itself.
The Spirit Power within her now was already far greater than when she had first been summoned.
Which of the two was stronger?
She didn't know.
But she had to try it at least once.
In this Holy Grail War, aside from herself, none of the remaining Servants seemed capable of defeating Archer.
"All right, Master. Understood."
In that case, she would fight.
Thunder Sanctuary's spherical shell began to change.
From outside, every crimson-gold arc pattern on the surface of the black sphere three hundred meters in the air went dark.
The sphere's surface turned pure black, without a trace of light.
Like a black hole.
Then it began to expand.
Its diameter grew from roughly twenty meters to a hundred in a single second.
Then its shape changed as well. It was no longer spherical.
Its front end gradually tapered to a point.
The entire sphere shifted from round to conical, like a black seed rapidly unfurling in the air into the form it was meant to have.
Three seconds later.
A black cone over a hundred meters long hung in the night sky, three hundred meters above Fuyuki City.
An enormous black hornlike protrusion extended from the middle of each side of the cone, resembling a bull's horns.
At the rear, the four white wings originally pressed against the sphere's surface had also changed in this final form.
They had all turned crimson.
Final Judgment: Sword of Blazing Flame.
Lahathelev.
At the cone's tip, terrifying energy was converging on a single point.
All the aggregated Spirit Power accumulated within Mayuri concentrated at that point.
The density there rose higher and higher. The air was compressed into plasma, shining with a blinding blue-white light.
The entire sky above Fuyuki City was affected.
Clouds for several kilometers around the Sword of Blazing Flame were pushed aside, revealing an enormous circular opening.
Moonlight fell directly onto the black cone over a hundred meters long, outlining its edges in cold white.
In the city below, windowpanes began to tremble faintly, humming.
A few pedestrians who had not yet managed to take shelter looked up. They could not see the Sword of Blazing Flame itself, only that strange, cloudless circular opening and the increasingly bright blue-white point at its center.
Aboard Vimana.
Kid Gil rose from his throne.
His crimson eyes fixed on the thing a hundred and fifty meters away as it transformed from a black sphere into a gigantic weapon. His expression changed several times.
The first second: mild interest.
The second second: a measure of added wariness.
The third second: his pupils turned diamond-shaped.
Sha Naqba Imuru.
Gilgamesh's skill.
It could perceive the truths of the world, analyze the structure of all things, and foresee possible futures.
Countless images flashed through his diamond-shaped pupils.
Every future ultimately pointed to the same outcome.
The strike that thing fired would be enough to wipe all of Fuyuki City off the map.
And that wasn't even its limit.
The Spirit Power being used for the strike the Sword of Blazing Flame was preparing to unleash now amounted to less than a tenth of Mayuri's total reserves.
All these days, Thunder Sanctuary had been absorbing the Greater Source's magical energy from the atmosphere to charge itself.
The amount it had accumulated had already reached an absurd level.
Kid Gil bit his lip.
Oh no.
I'd taken things too far.
He had chased after her intending only to play a little joke on Mayuri.
At yesterday's banquet, he had said he would come watch her battle with the King of Conquerors, but by the time he arrived, the battle was already over.
The King of Conquerors had been eliminated, and he hadn't seen enough, so he had wanted to stop Mayuri and tease her a little.
He hadn't expected this angelic big sister to open with her ultimate move.
And the kind of ultimate move that left absolutely no room for negotiation.
Kid Gil extended his right hand to his side.
A golden ripple opened beside him.
The weapon that emerged from it was unlike any other treasure in the Gate of Babylon.
It was neither a sword nor a spear.
Its shape resembled some kind of cylindrical drill, with something of an ancient ritual implement about it. Red inscriptions covered the surface of its three spiral blade sections, their script belonging to no human civilization.
Because this weapon had existed before human civilization was born.
Ea.
The Sword of Rupture.
The sword of creation that had cleaved heaven and earth from primordial chaos.
An EX-rank Anti-World Noble Phantasm.
Kid Gil grasped Ea's hilt.
The instant his fingers touched it, that familiar primordial power from before creation slowly awakened within the weapon.
The three spiral blade sections began counter-rotating at a very slow speed.
Yet Sha Naqba Imuru continued to show him the same unfavorable outcome.
He could see no future in which he won.
At least, not in a clash of pure firepower.
Kid Gil narrowed his crimson, diamond-shaped pupils.
He raised his left hand as well.
Golden ripples opened around him, one ring after another.
More than a dozen ripples opened at once.
What emerged from every ripple was a top-tier defensive Noble Phantasm.
The first was a petal-shaped shield with seven overlapping layers.
Its surface shimmered with iridescent light, each layer of petals constituting an independent defensive barrier.
Rho Aias.
The strongest defense against projectile Noble Phantasms.
The second was an enormous round shield.
A miniature projection of a world spread across the inside of the shield, containing images of sky, land, and ocean.
The Small World Enclosed by Achilles' Azure Sky. It compressed the concept of a small world into a defensive barrier.
On the third, Medusa's snake-haired face floated at the center of the shield, radiating a divine pressure that inspired instinctive dread.
Aegis, Shield of the Gods.
And there were more.
Over a dozen defensive Noble Phantasms spread around Vimana, forming layer upon layer of spherical defensive arrays.
Kid Gil staked everything on defense.
Ea was not for clashing head-on with someone-at least, not when Sha Naqba Imuru could see no chance of victory.
Only after every defense had been pierced would it be Ea's turn to act.
At the Sword of Blazing Flame's tip, the blue-white radiance had grown bright enough to turn the entire sky above Fuyuki City to day.
Charging complete.
Mayuri was deep inside the Sword of Blazing Flame.
She could feel that the density of Spirit Power gathered at the front had reached the point where it could be released.
This strike was enough to erase a city on a physical level.
"Fire."
In the very frame that word fell, the blue-white point at the tip shifted from gathering to release.
A torrent of annihilating lightning.
A pure-white beam over twenty meters in diameter shot from the Sword of Blazing Flame's front end, its core temperature so high that ordinary matter could not withstand it at all.
Along the beam's path, air molecules broke down into elementary particles the instant they touched the energy front, forcibly carving a vacuum channel ahead.
The beam traveled at close to the speed of light.
Only a hundred and fifty meters separated the Sword of Blazing Flame from Vimana.
To human perception, that distance was practically nonexistent.
The beam struck the spherical array formed by the dozen-plus defensive Noble Phantasms in front of Vimana.
At the same moment the beam arrived, Kid Gil poured all the magical energy in his body into Ea in his right hand.
Driven by magical energy, the three spiral blade sections began spinning at full speed.
The force field generated by their rotation pulled space into visible distortions, destabilizing even the surrounding structure.
The boy's voice rang out amid the blinding white light.
"Enuma-"
The rotation of Ea's three blade sections reached its critical point.
"-Elish!"