In this illusion, for as long as she could remember, Ritsuka Fujimaru had always faintly sensed her life was missing exactly one piece of the puzzle.
Looking back on it now, even holding just that one piece would be enough to call it complete.
She tore the school uniform off her body, revealing the white ceremonial garb underneath.
“Thinking about it now, all my memories, my whole life — they were force-fed to me.
I must have been trapped in this school this whole time.”
She looked at that white silhouette hovering in the air, the one who’d smashed through her cage and flown free.
A strange gleam flickered in the girl’s eyes, the Command Spells on the back of her hand glowing faintly.
Having three people carrying her through this didn’t mean she got to do nothing at all.
As long as these Command Spells got used at the right moment…
“The King of Hassans, this weak?
Must be some knockoff.”
Battle-skirt billowing, Leon hovered above the sinking school building.
He worked his arms a bit, checking that his injuries wouldn’t slow him down in a fight.
Honestly, he’d completely lost track of what was going on in this world at this point.
Not just because of his Viltrumite upbringing — it was also because he’d quit the game right after beating Goetia.
The ones who’d left an impression were mostly Scathach, his very first 5-star pull.
And King Hassan — the 5-star he’d finally whaled a good chunk of money to pull, at the very end.
“They’re saying it’s the whole of human history hunting her down, but it doesn’t seem like it can bring nearly as much power to bear here as I’d have guessed?”
Using the vantage point up high, Leon scanned the city below.
Not just the school district — everywhere he looked, Servants were locked in battles against their own kind.
Wait, is this actually some “left brain versus right brain of Humanity’s collective will” kind of script?
If so, seemed like little Ritsuka still had plenty of supporters on her side.
Leon’s gaze drifted back to the ruins of the school building.
At the center of the smoke, a single point of blue light flared to life.
Right after, a pillar of blue flame shot skyward, clearing a wide open space, and at its center, King Hassan rose up on a broken pillar.
The Servants around him dissolved one after another, melting into light and flowing into him.
Becoming the massive shield in his hand, and the long thorny spine at his back.
Over in the other two battlefields, the same thing was happening around Heracles and Gilgamesh.
Ah, guess this is a “resurgence” moment too, huh?
Sensing the surge of presence rising below, the corner of Leon’s mouth curled up:
“Now that’s more like it~”
He shot forward in a blast, his fist colliding with the skeletal shield.
Layer after layer of blue-flame protection rippled across its surface, shattering violently under the extreme force of the impact.
The instant his fist made contact, the shockwave it generated wiped the school ruins clean off the map entirely.
Bam!
The shield shattered, the arm holding it bending grotesquely, and King Hassan went flying.
He slowed himself by driving his sword into the ground, and melted back into the rising dust.
The bell tolled.
Surrounding Leon, a voice rang out from every direction.
“What a thick stench of blood.
Just how many lives have you slaughtered, how many civilizations have you trampled underfoot?”
The voice was hollow, resonant, echoing through the swirling dust, as if something else’s will had taken it over entirely.
“You people even care about what happens off-world?”
Leon raised an eyebrow, then said, flat and unbothered:
“Anyway, I’ve got zero interest in explaining myself to someone too scared to even show their face in front of me.”
His gaze never left King Hassan.
Out of whatever conscience he still had left, he’d actually tried a few different approaches — but he’d only managed to save a small handful.
And whenever this kind of behavior got noticed, he’d end up having to personally kill them in front of his instructor anyway, just to prove it had been an oversight and not disloyalty.
He’d considered running, too.
But the Regent placed a lot of importance on this batch of new blood.
From the moment he was born up until now, the only stretch of time he’d spent without a grown Viltrumite nearby was these last few days on Earth.
An underdeveloped minor couldn’t outfly them, and he didn’t dare gamble on whether one “oversight” too many would get him weeded out.
Leon casually snatched a white feather drifting down from the sky.
Blue, red, green — his hands had already been stained with the blood of far too many alien species.
Same as he always did after his hands ended up covered in blood yet again, he gave them a habitual shake.
Then, he located King Hassan.
His right hand turned into a blade, and he vanished on the spot, leaving nothing behind but a web of cracks in the ground.
In the blink of an eye, a pocket of space was violently carved out of the yellow dust.
At its center stood Leon, hand-blade raised, and King Hassan, wreathed in blue flame, sword raised to strike.
“Absurd!”
Under the tolling bell, the red glow in King Hassan’s eye sockets flared brighter.
“Hear this!
The evening bell has named you.
Feather that heralds death, sever the head—”
“Azrael: The Angel That Announces Death!”
That barely-perceptible sense of instant death vanished as quickly as it came, and Leon surged forward too.
Noble Phantasm versus hand-blade.
A blue sword-light no bystander could even track collided with a plain, unassuming afterimage.
The moment they touched, the ground caved in a little, then rapidly widened outward.
Half a second later, the massive blade gave out first, cracks spreading across its surface.
The blade itself had sunk barely a few centimeters into Leon’s palm.
He grabbed the blade in return, yanked it toward himself, and used the momentum to leap up, knees bent, body angled perpendicular to King Hassan.
A flying kick slammed straight into the chest plate, shattering half his body.
After the kick sent him flying, Leon used the recoil to spin the other way, stepping through empty air to chase him down.
That display prompted whatever presence had possessed the world to speed up its assessment.
It could find no trace of Leon anywhere in Earth’s history, or in any mythological lineage — an outsider never once recorded, anywhere.
His power level might read as unremarkable by comparison, but nothing detectable on him registered as anything beyond the purely physical.
It seemed this man achieved this level of destruction on raw body alone.
Earth already had more than enough monsters and demons running around — where the hell had this thing come from?
The glowing young man on the other battlefield was even stranger.
One glance from him, and the records showed no small number of Heroic Spirits had already been altered to bear his likeness.
That kind of contamination was a thousand, ten thousand times worse than those two flying ones.
Time to bring out the big guns.
Should it use “the Sword”?
Or should it wheel out its trump card — the strongest Master, Mash Kyrielight?
In the split second it spent thinking that over, Leon had already closed the distance, fist wreathed in a ring of displaced air.
At the same moment, off in the distance, Ritsuka Fujimaru burned through one Command Spell.
A surge of power welled up out of nowhere, flowing from her heart down into her fist.
What should have blown out another gaping crater’s worth of damage instead completely obliterated the Servant’s body outright.
The ground behind it was carved with massive radiating scars from the blast, armor fragments scattering into the air.
“Tougher than I expected.”
Fight over, Leon touched down gently.
He and the orange-haired girl exchanged a look from a distance, and, in perfect sync, gave each other a thumbs-up.
Right after, he flickered forward and chopped off the hand Gilgamesh had just raised to draw out his Ea.
“Hybrid trash—”
Nyos casually intercepted the attack, forcing Gilgamesh back.
“You could’ve just let him use it, you know, Leon.”
He shot a look of displeasure up at Leon in the air, lips looking suspiciously pouty.
An adult acting all cute — thoroughly disgusting.
Leon crossed his arms.
By the time Clark, having flung Heracles far away, made it back, Leon finally spoke up:
“What I mean, Nyos, is I hope you haven’t forgotten our actual mission here is evacuation.”
“No need to remind me of that, friend.”
Nyos’s eyes narrowed slightly; he could feel an endless stream of enemies pouring into the fight.
Too bad.
Being a reckless mortal for a while there had genuinely felt great.
“It says the highway to Snowfield, right?
Let’s get moving.”
To be continued…