12:04am, Outside an old, abandoned church,
Lancer stood on the edge of the churchyard, a convenient fence separating him from the territory Archer's Master had established around the property. Old and weathered gravestones decorated the path to the stone steeple, and each forgotten name was a reminder of the fate that would await him should he fail. Shivering like a leaf in the wind, he counted his options on the corners of a cross, but soon ran out, as he had only one.
"Goddammit."
How many regrets followed him? How many of them were the results of his own cowardice? How many times had he looked what needed to be done in the eye and turned around?
He had enough haunting him, and being little more than a ghost himself wasn't an excuse enough for his conscience.
"Dammmmmiittt!"
Not giving any more moments for self-criticism, knowing time was of the essence, he leaped up and onto the tip of the iron fence, entering the boundary, and leaped into the air. Swinging back, the head of his rake detached and flew upwards, spinning in a plume of fire to create a small sun against the black sky. Bringing it down with a defiant squeal, Heaven's Nine-Tooth Rake carved through the stone and brick like butter, leaving what remained to collapse inward: all that remained was half the front wall and a massive gaping hole in what was once the roof.
"Get out here, ya bastard!"
...
Across the way, facing the back of the church, Saber, Chrysaor, crouched low on the upward slope, watching the one small window for any signs of movement. His heart beat furiously in his chest, and he briefly questioned the cruelty of binding Spirits like himself to such biological pains even after death, but such was the cost of his own poor planning, and for that he had no one to blame but himself.
A squeal ran out from the other side of the church, and then a small sun appeared in the sky.
The signal.
His brother, Pegasus, was the fastest creature alive. He had no reason to believe he had inherited the same talent, but, in this moment, he desperately hoped that some quirk in the Throne of Heroes would grant him that mercy.
Like a coiled spring his tense body released with a burst of splashing blue energy from his calves, allowing his Mana Burst to propel him forward as much as it could; accelerating the mana flow of his body for whatever bonus it gave. Becoming a blur of blue and gold, he cleared the several yards in a second, leaping forward and curling into a ball so that he burst through the window back-first and flipped onto three points atop a wooden floor.
He scanned his surroundings for anything at all and made enough progress to realize he was in a kitchen-
-Before red-orange lights danced across the floors and walls with dangerous precision.
"Damn it all."
...
"Archer. There's two. Get here now."
'On my way.'
His Servant alerted, he marched to the lockers opposite his workbench, swinging them open with a ferocity he had never shown in polite company. In front of him was his pride and joy, a prototype he'd never tested beyond his lab. Normally, such a field test would fill him with the closest thing to delight that he was capable of experiencing, but his impatience kept him far from his usual state of mind.
A reasonable man would have spent his mental energy pondering on the identity and abilities of the Servants in front of him, but he was not a reasonable man: he was a logical one. The identities were obvious to him: it was Lancer and Saber. Rider, Berserker, and Caster weren't possibilities, and Assassin wouldn't have gotten caught. What bothered him wasn't the question of danger or identity, those seemed settled to him: what troubled his mind was motivation. What was it that Saber had to gain? Why go so far out of the way for his enemy? Why violate the truce for such a petty concern? Unless he had no intention of joining the truce to begin with?
With that at the front of his mind, he could reach no conclusion except that Lancer's co-conspirator was either stupid or plainly insane. Either way, he needed to be put down.
He had similar thoughts about the girl rattling her chains next to him.
...
Above, the flames faded away. Even though the room had been covered floor-to-ceiling with retardant mystics, the trap that Saber triggered still left the entire kitchen charred black, and all flammable materials glowed with soft embers.
In such intense heat, any normal person would have died in an instant. The arms they raised in a pitiful attempt at protection would have been burned to the bone. The face would have been left unrecognizable, and the eyes would have melted from the skull if they hadn't wholly evaporated. The stomach would burst, leaving the organs to spill onto the floor with whatever else remained of the body as it collapsed like wet paper, and even most Servants would be little exception.
Instead, Chrysaor stood weakly in front of the window, and spent what remained of his mental energy thanking whatever powers that be that his Master had been left behind.
Saber's body was formed by an ever-churning current of mana in a sense far more literal than any ordinary Servant. More than his lack of typical flesh, the mana which made his approximation of the human form was of the 'water' element: a gift of his father Poseidon. But even with his natural resistance to fire, the sleeves of his jacket had burned away, his already black-speckled hair was darker than it was light, and what rose remained still held glowing orange flecks. All of his exposed flesh was somewhere between red and black, and moonlight found white teeth through a hole in his cheek as he straightened himself.
As clarity came, so too did a thin golden mist cling to his body from head to toe. His body being little more than a projection, damage was easy and cheap to repair relative to most Servants. All it took was circulating the mana to, in a certain sense, reset the body. Damaged "cells", in lieu of any better term, were retracted and replaced with new ones while the old ones were restored to their proper state. This was still different from healing. The damage was sustained: this process only made sure that the body functioned properly and wasn't hindered by petty things like blood loss and broken bones.
Not only did this process cost mana, though a low amount relative to normal healing, but since the damage was "stored" rather than healed, his Spirit Origin became increasingly unstable over time, decreasing both his mana reserves and his mana output until the damage was healed properly. This is where his own healing factor and Miracles came into play.
Already the hole in his cheek was closing, and flesh turned back to its proper hue. His constitution returned to him, if only in part, and he took a tentative step forward.
-His eyes darted one way, then another. Nothing happened. He took another step.
-A hiss of steam shot from the roof overhead, and two spheres the size of baseballs fell from the ceiling, clacking against the wooden floor and clinging like broken bells.
He let go of the breath he'd been holding, "There it is."
The slate-gray metal spheres burned from within, orange light filtering through runic carvings, before another jolt of steam shot them back into the air. Flames burst outward with the same severity as the trap which caught him not but a few seconds earlier, and he braced himself in vain as the flames stopped less than a meter from its origin, hovering in the air like clouds.
"Elementals..?"
No, that wasn't quite right. In the first place, fire spirits didn't exist naturally. Elemental Spirits were reserved for things that were alive, like trees and flowers, or which fostered life, such as mountains and rivers. Fire was not alive, and neither did it foster life: in fact, it was anti-life. There was no such thing as a natural fire spirit, only spirits who had learned to control and harness fire.
More than that, if these had been such spirits, he'd be able to identify them as such. Devils, Demons, Celestials, Fey... his own Divine blood was trained to recognize them. Either they were so well concealed that he couldn't see past the blinding light that surrounded them, or...
...They were artificial.
Without wasting any more time on pointless thoughts, he took a wide stance, lowing his center, and calling his sword to his hands-
-Sickles?
The shortswords that resembled stakes retained their golden hue at their base, but, as it went upwards, was interrupted by a hard black with a glowing magenta blade emerging outwards from the darkness.
He shook his head. There was no time to process the development. For the moment, he only needed to remember that his blades were now for slashing, not stabbing.
Saber readied himself- and hesitated. After that blast, and the damage he'd taken, he had no energy to waste on these... whatever they were. His mana only gave him a defensive advantage: it wasn't as if he could summon great plumes of water like his father could. He would need to physically destroy the cores, but could he do it without getting burned? At what point would he need to retreat in order to heal and recharge?
As if sensing his indecision, one of the flying flames flashed with intent and rushed towards him like a scattered ember. As the fire peeled back, it seemed to reveal shapes- as if three comets were coming at once, only connected by the tail. Without any time to think, he swiped at the nearest burst, cutting through the flames without resistance as fire seared his arm.
If that were the end, he would've felt some comfort that burns were all he received, but as he cut uselessly through the red flare, the flames that reached out narrowed and solidified into white needles that pierced his shoulder from one end to the other, and a similar claw formed on the left that reached deep into his side.
"Augh!"
Had he felt such pain before? He was being burned from the inside out; a searing heat spreading through his veins, as if his very blood were beginning to boil. The third flare reared, forming into the shape of some skeletal hound; its needle-filled maw opening around his neck in silent damnation.
He desperately swung at the flaming mass, and felt a slight give from within as he bumped something solid. The maw lurched as if to vomit and the white burst into flaming red, swirling around his body in a tornado of searing heat that sent him stumbling back against the counter behind him. At the same time, knives of white formed within, cutting into him from random angles in a flurry of shallow cuts which were only easier to bear because his entire body was engulfed in the same, mind-numbing pain- so severe that he reflexively withdrew his sickles.
But, among the blinding light, his mind was able to pick up a center of heat: an orbiting flame more severe than those around it. He bore enough of the heat to track its path across one, two orbits, and grabbed it with a hand like a striking viper. He turned and slammed it on the hard counter, allowed himself only a moment to second-guess his decision, and stabbed the sickle through his hand and into the sphere. Both shuddered weakly in their pain, but only the flames disappeared, freeing Chrysaor to rip the blade from his hand and face his remaining opponent.
The giant ember flew upwards, cutting across ceiling-hung cupboards and pouncing down from above. Saber crouched as he approached and, in the millisecond before it was too late, leaped upwards, turning in the air and planting both feet on the ceiling.
He crossed his sickles. He had never tried something so ambitious before, but he didn't have much of a choice. He primed his mana to burst: filling his mind with images of a riptide-
-A coiling snake.
The swirl of a crashing wave.
- Venom dripping from a viper's fangs.
A rip and pull of a whirlpool.
-Charybdis.
Glimmering light arced across his rose-hued eyes as he launched himself towards the floor. He took his speed into a spin and swung with a monstrous strength; whirlwinds of electric magenta flew outwards, slicing massive gashes into the floor, sending him back upwards and blowing away the weaker flames to leave only the white that immediately surrounded the core.
His target in sight, he spun in the air and brought down his left sickle, cleaving halfway into the metal sphere and letting the collision against the floor carry the blade all the way through.
The false life within dwindled away, and the chapel's kitchen was still once more.
Ripping the sickle out of the floor, he saw his other weapon fall limply next to the broken core. He only realized then that he could no longer feel his right hand. With eyes that were almost too afraid to look, he found all that remained was a twitching, mangled mess of a limb that would turn even the sturdiest stomachs.
Saber was now officially running on fumes. He had wanted to avoid drawing on his Master's mana as much as he could: his body had a certain vampirism to it, and tended to take more than it needed. Draining Monica like that would defeat the purpose of leaving her behind: she needed at least the energy to run away if she could.
Her words still hang in his head, 'What's she supposed to think when somebody a hundred times more capable, and a hundred times stronger than herself has already given up, and refuses to even try? What's she supposed to do then?'
Right or wrong, he wouldn't be able to forgive himself if he didn't give his all. He was a Servant, her Servant, and he had a duty to prioritize her above and before all else, especially himself. It was fundamentally wrong to rely on her, to endanger her, while he still had other options.
And so he limbered his body, letting his natural mechanisms run their course, and pressed on with all the swiftness he could muster-
-And the floor gave out. The force of his running step sent his foot through the damaged wood and the resulting fall reduced the rest to splinters. With his good left hand he stabbed at the boards to catch himself, but this too broke away and left him to crack his back over a wooden beam and fall face-first onto a concrete floor.
The cold stone irritated his burns, and as he weakly lifted himself up, his ears caught rattling chains, and before him was a man in terracotta armor, his cold eyes and stony face staring daggers into the fallen Servant.
....