Maintaining a cautious five-meter perimeter, Surtr refrained from closing the distance.
Her supernatural combat senses picked up an overwhelming, suffocating presence lurking directly behind the petite girl.
Undoubtedly the Greek demigod himself—Berserker Heracles.
“Hello.
I’m Surtr.” Focusing her attention on the snow-white homunculus before her, Surtr offered a calm, polite response.
Illyasviel von Einzbern.
The biological daughter of Emiya Kiritsugu and Irisviel, as well as the living vessel of the Lesser Grail in this Holy Grail War.
Commanding the supreme demigod Heracles while possessing Magic Circuits that vastly surpassed any mortal magus on the planet, she stood as the undisputed heavyweight favorite of the entire ritual.
Unfortunately, her psyche was heavily fractured abandoned by Kiritsugu as a toddler and subjected to the grotesque, inhuman biological restructuring of the Einzbern family, her perception of human morality was deeply twisted.
Honestly, almost every member of the Emiya household carried some degree of mental illness.
Looking back at the Fourth War, the only relatively stable individual turned out to be Irisviel—the artificial homunculus with the shortest lifespan.
Perhaps because Irisviel was functionally a newborn, her heart had remained pure until the end.
Yet beneath the sadistic exterior of this pint-sized tyrant lay an extraordinarily pure, unspoken yearning.
[Client: Illyasviel von Einzbern] [Quest: Desperately yearns for a genuine family] [Reward: Primogems ×600, Random Reward ×1] ‘Another emotionally heavy commission…’ Surtr mused.
Resolving this one might actually be straightforward: she could just drag Emiya Shirou over by his collar and say, ‘Surprise!
Your old man actually left you a white-haired older sister!’ Dismissing the system prompt, Surtr tilted her head with mild curiosity.
“Is there something you need from me?” She wasn’t surprised by Illya’s ambush the girl had been tailing them from a distance since they exited the library.
But why had she chosen to corner Surtr instead of hunting down her step-brother Shirou?
Was she actually planning to initiate an open street fight in broad daylight?
Surtr cast a subtle glance around the perimeter.
An ethereal, translucent mist had quietly blanketed the entire street, and the sparse pedestrians from moments ago had vanished without a trace—cleared away by a high-tier bounded field.
Well, it seemed this guest had zero friendly intentions.
“What a strange question, Big Sister.” “Since two rival Masters have crossed paths in the open, is there any logical alternative besides tearing each other to pieces?” Illya tilted her head with an innocent, angelic smile, her crimson eyes locking greedily onto the back of Surtr’s right hand.
The glowing, flame-shaped Command Seals were boldly exposed across Surtr’s skin without a shred of concealment.
“Emiya Shirou is an active Master as well.
Why didn’t you go corner him instead?” Honestly, ignoring the boy seemed completely out of character.
Naturally, Surtr didn’t actually want Illya to butcher Shirou she was just genuinely curious about her tactical logic.
“Shirou?” Illya blinked innocently before giving a sweet, bloodcurdling explanation.
“Shirou hasn’t summoned his Servant yet, right?
If I execute him right now, it will be such a massive headache if the Grail reassigns the Command Seals to someone else.” Executing her own family was treated as the baseline prerequisite.
It was painfully obvious that the Einzbern indoctrination had thoroughly scrambled the girl’s moral compass.
“Hurry up and materialize your Servant, Big Sister.
Otherwise, you won’t have another chance.” The arrogant, haughty declaration sounded eerily reminiscent of Cú Chulainn from two nights ago.
“She’s tied up with fieldwork at the moment and can’t make it over.” Surtr gave a languid shake of her head.
“Besides, do we really need to throw hands right now?
I thought we were having a rather pleasant chat back at the library.” Surtr pointed toward the delicate homunculus bird woven from magical hair hovering above Illya’s shoulder.
“Is it because you care so deeply about your old man’s past that you’ve become this obedient?
If you’re willing to listen, I can share more stories about Kiritsugu.
I’m really not in the mood for a brawl today.” Surtr’s tone sounded thoroughly unmotivated.
Clashing with Berserker right now under unprepared conditions offered zero strategic profit.
In terms of raw frontal melee, her odds against Berserker were roughly fifty-fifty.
At best, she could hack away three or four of his lives with Lævateinn, only to hand the demigod adaptive conceptual resistance against her flames.
It was a total waste of horsepower.
If possible, she preferred waiting for Medea’s support.
Surtr could pin Heracles down in melee while Medea slipped behind Illya as an assassin, using Rule Breaker to sever their contract in one clean strike.
There was zero need to smash through Heracles’s twelve resurrection lives head-on.
That demigod was a massive headache even for an apocalyptic Fire Giant.
Unfortunately, Miss Homunculus didn’t share her practical mindset.
Hearing Surtr’s seemingly casual yet brutally sarcastic commentary, the murderous fury smoldering inside Illya’s chest exploded like a powder keg.
Any neutral third party watching would swear Surtr was deliberately griefing the child.
If you don’t know how to speak politely, please donate your tongue to someone in need!
‘Care deeply?!
Obedient?!’ ‘What do you take me for?!
A stray puppy that wags its tail just from hearing an abandoned owner’s name?!’ As if the rawest, most agonizing scar in her heart had been viciously prodded, Illya’s porcelain cheeks flushed with furious scarlet.
“Berserker!
Tear her into bloody pieces for me!” A shrill, venomous screech tore from the girl’s throat.
Rumble—!
Materializing directly behind Illya was a colossal, ink-black titan exceeding two meters in height.
With wild, seaweed-like dark hair cascading over massive boulder-like shoulders, a bare, hyper-muscular torso, and an ancient bronze war skirt, the demigod manifested into reality.
The greatest hero of Greek mythology—Heracles.
Possessing the supreme conceptual Noble Phantasm God Hand: The Twelve Labors, his flesh was permanently tempered into an absolute armor that completely negated all attacks below A-Rank (including A-Rank), alongside granting twelve resurrection lives.
Furthermore, backed by Illya’s bottomless homunculus mana supply, lost resurrection stocks could even regenerate once every three days.
Coupled with the monstrous parameter multipliers granted by Mad Enhancement, defeating him in close-quarters combat was practically an impossibility.
Yet ironically, facing him in the Berserker container was actually a stroke of good fortune.
Had Heracles been summoned in the Archer or Saber class with his legendary combat intellect and Nine Lives archery intact, he would have been ten times more terrifying.
At the exact same instant, a golden prompt flashed across Surtr’s vision.
[Client: Berserker (Heracles)] [Quest: Protect Illyasviel von Einzbern with your life] [Rewards: Primogems ×1500, Random Reward ×3] A quest that perfectly encapsulated the legendary demigod’s tragic devotion.
Surtr wondered if the reward would still pay out if she ended up putting the big guy down herself.
Yet there was zero time to ponder system mechanics.
He was already upon her.
Answering Illya’s command, the black titan unleashed an earth-shattering roar, hoisting a massive stone slab sword as he lunged forward like a hypersonic artillery shell!
Boom—!
The sheer atmospheric friction generated by his colossal mass produced a series of ear-splitting sonic booms as the towering demigod descended upon Surtr like a falling mountain.
For any ordinary magus standing in his path, this was the absolute, undisputed definition of despair.
Behind him, Illya’s lips curled into a cruel, sadistic smirk, already anticipating the visceral spectacle of the red-haired intruder being pulverized into a puddle of crimson paste.
“Good grief…
picking on a fragile, defenseless Master like me.” “Fine.
I guess I’ll play along.” Sighing in exasperation, Surtr took half a step backward the split second Heracles launched.
She twisted her waist, cocked her right fist, and assumed a textbook striking stance.
Fwoosh—!
A colossal phantom of molten rock and raging magma condensed behind her, mirroring Surtr’s stance in perfect sync.
The entire sequence unfolded in a single microsecond.
Heracles’s stone slab cleaved downward with apocalyptic fury.
Simultaneously, the magma phantom and Surtr unleashed their punches!
Crash—!
The molten magma fist slammed violently against the stone broadsword in mid-air, halting the blade’s descent.
Sheltered beneath the giant’s fiery silhouette, Surtr’s slender, porcelain fist—wreathed in roaring, compressed hellfire—broke the sound barrier and drove straight into Heracles’s chiseled abdominal muscles!
BOOM—!
A fair, delicate fist detonated with kinetic devastation that completely defied the laws of physics.
A shockwave of blistering Muspelheim prana exploded outward from the point of impact, forming a massive expanding ring of shockwaves and incinerating fire that scorched the asphalt into glass.
In the blink of an eye, the two-meter-tall demigod was violently blasted backward at a velocity faster than his initial charge, bowling straight through three concrete utility poles and an ancient curbside oak tree before finally crashing into the pavement.
The gale-force sonic shockwave whipped up by the collision violently rustled Illya’s silver hair, completely freezing the cruel smirk on her face into a deadpan, slack-jawed mask of pure bewilderment.
Turning her neck with mechanical stiffness, Illya glanced at Berserker struggling to haul himself out of the rubble behind her, and then looked back at the glowing red Command Seals unmistakably etched onto the back of Surtr’s hand.
A tiny, utterly broken squeak slipped from the girl’s trembling lips.
“Eh…?” Meanwhile, inside the presidential suite of a luxury high-rise hotel barely five hundred meters from the battlefield.
“Lord El-Melloi II.” A soft, timid voice as gentle as a freshly baked pastry drifted from the hallway.
A slender girl wrapped in a frayed gray traveler’s cloak stepped into the living room, gazing anxiously toward the television set.
“I felt it as well, Gray.” Waver Velvet sat rigidly on the plush sofa, his fingers pausing over the buttons of his video game controller.
His brows knit into a severe frown as he raised his hand to massage his aching temples.
“Just which uneducated, rule-flouting barbarian is starting a high-tier Servant brawl on a public thoroughfare in broad daylight…?” His exasperated tone sounded like an exhausted professor scolding a delinquent student caught vandalizing university property.
A professional habit developed over a decade of teaching at the Clock Tower.
“Judging by the magical shockwaves vibrating through the leylines, both combatants possess absurdly monstrous parameters.” Standing by the panoramic floor-to-ceiling windows, a towering, red-haired giant with a majestic beard set down his joystick and gazed out over the city.
The conqueror’s booming voice buzzed with undeniable excitement.
“How about it, boy?
Fancy going down to witness the spectacle?” The King of Conquerors, Rider Iskandar, grinned broadly, his fiery red eyes flashing with battle lust.
“…Let’s go take a look.
But we maintain a strict observation distance under no circumstances do we escalate this into a direct conflict.” Waver rubbed his temples again, feeling a familiar, agonizing throb in his gut.
For some ominous reason, his finely tuned danger instincts whispered that whatever he was about to witness down on that street would completely shatter his sanity.
His stomach ulcers were definitely acting up again.