“Are there other combatants nearby?” Hearing Medea’s telepathic report, Surtr was surprised, but only mildly so.
The catastrophic destruction unleashed by her clash with Berserker was loud enough to vibrate the entire city it would be bizarre if neighboring factions didn’t come running to investigate.
“Describe their physical characteristics.” “Three individuals.
The Servant resembles a massive, hairy red-haired gorilla.
The Master is a gaunt man in a sharp black business suit with long, dark hair.
And beside them is a suspicious figure completely enveloped in a frayed gray traveler’s cloak.
I avoided closing the distance to prevent triggering their bounded fields.” “That’s more than enough.” Surtr nodded mentally.
The ‘hairy gorilla’ was Rider Iskandar, the suited gentleman was Lord El-Melloi II (Waver Velvet), and the cloaked figure was indisputably his apprentice, Gray.
The elusive Rider faction she had spent all afternoon searching for had conveniently delivered themselves right to her doorstep.
And the Master turned out to be Waver himself—the Fourth War veteran who had famously sat out the canonical Fifth War had actually entered the ring this time around.
Not only had he deployed personally, but he had dragged his most formidable disciple along with him.
This was decidedly unpleasant news.
The King of Conquerors with his Reality Marble was already a top-tier tactical nightmare, and now he was backed by Gray wielding the Divine Construct of King Arthur—the Holy Lance Rhongomyniad.
In an all-out, three-way brawl, even Berserker Heracles might not survive their combined onslaught.
Though looking at the silver lining: at least the professor hadn’t mobilized the entire El-Melloi Classroom to stage an international field trip.
He had retained a shred of restraint.
“Master, does the operation proceed?” Medea queried through their spiritual link.
“If we move to claim Berserker, that observing faction will almost certainly intervene.” Waver’s group might not know the exact mechanics of Medea’s Noble Phantasm, nor were they privy to Illya’s Lesser Grail nature.
However, deducing that Surtr was stalling Berserker to assassinate the Master required zero genius.
If Surtr obtained Illya’s Command Seals, she could easily subjugate the mindless demigod into a second contract.
Surtr was already an unquantifiable, out-of-specification powerhouse no sane Master would stand idly by while she annexed a second demigod Servant.
A multi-faction clash was practically guaranteed.
‘A bit annoying.’ After all, if an assassination failed on the opening strike, subsequent attempts became ten times harder—and Medea was hardly a trained professional killer.
Should they abort?
Yet having battered Heracles for several minutes, walking away completely empty-handed left a bitter taste in her mouth.
And with such a heavyweight contender entering the board, their priority was either reinforcing their own frontline or stripping the enemy’s assets.
If they couldn’t recruit Berserker, then…
“Plan continues.” Surtr reached her decision without hesitation.
“However, prepare a backup contingency just in case.” “A bold command.
Understood, Master.” Answering through the tether, the dark-robed witch vanished from the rooftop and materialized silently within a narrow, shadowed alleyway barely fifteen meters behind Illya.
This was the absolute safety threshold advancing a single step further would trigger the girl’s perimeter wards.
‘Those hair familiars need to be neutralized first.’ Medea’s cold gaze pierced through the alley shadows, locking onto the silver-haired girl standing proudly on the boulevard.
Orbiting Illya’s shoulders were two crystalline bird familiars crafted from woven hair, maintaining an active sensory bounded field.
‘As expected of the Lesser Grail…
this mana density makes ordinary modern magi look like beggars.’ Up close, Medea could clearly perceive that Illya’s biological circuits were directly fused into Fuyuki’s spiritual leylines, granting her a virtually inexhaustible supply of divine prana.
A state of localized infinite mana.
Any standard Master unlucky enough to cross paths with her would be relentlessly bombarded into dust.
However, in Medea’s expert eyes, the girl’s thaumaturgical execution left much to be desired.
While infinitely superior to mundane magi, her spellweaving was painfully rigid—like a prodigy reciting dry textbook formulas without true artistic comprehension.
The inevitable developmental flaw of an artificially engineered homunculus.
Dismissing the girl’s casting style, Medea turned her gaze further down the boulevard.
That was the apocalyptic epicenter where Surtr and Heracles were currently brawling.
A petite girl grappling with an ancient demigod titan despite the colossal disparity in physical mass, her Master was deflecting every mountain-cleaving strike with fluid, terrifying poise.
Even though Medea had witnessed it multiple times, her Master truly was an ungodly monster, matching the greatest hero of Greek mythology blow for blow.
Medea naturally recognized Heracles in their mythical era, he was an undisputed living legend whose name shook the Mediterranean.
Even diminished within the Servant framework, he possessed the brute force to steamroll the Fifth Holy Grail War.
Attempting to brute-force through that mountain of muscle with conventional bombardment spells was an exercise in pure futility.
Unless she had access to the venom of the Lernaean Hydra—and not even an Age of Gods sorceress could conjure mythological hydra bile out of thin air.
Reaching her pale arm out from beneath her violet robes, Medea revealed a jagged, lightning-bolt-shaped dagger resting in her palm.
Its blade shimmered with a mesmerizing, iridescent rainbow hue.
The ultimate contract-severing Noble Phantasm—Rule Breaker: All Spells Must Be Broken.
“Sigh…
even though my designated class container is Caster, why am I the one always stuck doing dirty Assassin work?” Letting out a soft, theatrical sigh, Medea raised the iridescent dagger to her chest and channeled her message into Surtr’s mind.
‘Target acquired.
Ready on your mark, Master.’ ‘Received.’ A concise, razor-sharp reply.
In that exact microsecond, Surtr’s entire combat demeanor underwent a violent, tectonic shift.
It was the spiritual equivalent of a depressed corporate wage-slave dragging her feet at 4:59 PM suddenly winning a hundred-million-dollar lottery jackpot and flipping her boss’s desk into the ceiling.
Even with his cognitive faculties scrambled by Mad Enhancement, Heracles’s primal beast instincts screamed that the predator standing before him had just removed her safety restraints.
Letting out an enraged, territorial roar, the black titan brought his massive stone slab sword down in a cataclysmic, vertical cleave!
CRASH—!
The reinforced concrete boulevard buckled and shattered into a thousand jagged boulders, churning up subterranean bedrock as a crater detonated beneath his swing.
Yet the earth-shattering strike struck nothing but empty air.
In the very next heartbeat, a sleek leather boot stepped directly onto the descending flat of his stone blade.
The colossal, logic-defying physical mass behind that petite foot forced the demigod’s sword to sink several inches deeper into the asphalt.
In that exact fraction of a second, the crimson edge of Lævateinn drove straight into Heracles’s chest!
Boundless light and apocalyptic thermal energy converged upon the broadsword’s fuller.
Compressing…
then detonating outward!
“That’s life number one.” A cold, mocking whisper brushed past his ears.
BOOM—!
A blinding supernova of Muspelheim hellfire erupted between the two titans!
Heracles’s entire upper torso, skull, and shoulders were flash-vaporized into pure energy in less than a microsecond.
The legendary conceptual armor granted by God Hand failed to halt a strike meticulously calculated to exceed his defensive threshold.
A searing hurricane of thermal shockwaves swept across the district, instantly igniting the roadside trees into bare, charred skeletons.
The instantaneous reversal caught every spectator on the battlefield completely off guard.
The red-haired girl who had been passively weathering Berserker’s onslaught for minutes had abruptly accelerated, deleting a mythological demigod’s life in a single heartbeat.
The transition was so blindingly fast it felt surreal.
Watching from a hundred paces away, Illya’s jaw dropped in genuine horror.
She was genuinely shaken once more she hadn’t fathomed that a self-proclaimed ‘Stand User’ could muster such grotesque offensive firepower.
Yet her terror lasted barely a second.
So what if Berserker dropped a single life?
The adaptive immunity of God Hand would grant him absolute conceptual resistance against that specific flame as his flesh regenerated, meaning she couldn’t repeat the trick twice!
“Tear her to shre—” Illya’s screech choked in her throat.
A sudden, sharp ripple of high-tier spatial displacement flared directly behind her neck.
Whipping her head around in panic, her ruby eyes reflected a dark-robed silhouette stepping out from a shimmering magic circle, an iridescent, lightning-shaped dagger descending toward her chest!
The dagger fell.