The dark-hooded silhouette of Medea was reflected with crystal clarity inside Illya’s wide, jewel-like pupils.
Looking down from above, barely half a pace separated the witch from the girl.
In less than a fraction of a second, the iridescent, jagged dagger would plunge directly into the homunculus’s chest.
The hair familiars guarding her perimeter had already been paralyzed by High-Speed Divine Words, leaving Illya’s petite frame twisting backward in desperate, futile evasion.
“Berserker…!” Her trembling lips parted in pure terror as crimson Command Spells flared across her skin.
In the very next instant, through the miraculous spatial leap of a Command Spell, a massive dark silhouette bypassed distance itself, materializing right beside the girl.
A desperate spark of hope ignited in Illya’s eyes—only to be instantly crushed into absolute despair.
A rancid, charred stench billowed from the grotesque, smoldering substance pooling upon the pavement.
Most of the demigod’s upper torso and skull were completely gone, while his remaining limbs continued to sizzle under the relentless bite of crimson embers.
While this catastrophic trauma was merely a minor setback for Heracles—guaranteed to fully regenerate within a minute—time was the one resource they had completely run out of.
Had Illya chosen to engage Medea in close-quarters spellcraft, she might have bought a sliver of survival.
Instead, summoning a regenerating corpse had squandered her final defensive window.
Medea stepped forward.
Rule Breaker cleaved downward with lethal precision!
Yet faster than the falling dagger was a blinding pillar of divine thunder descending from the heavens.
KRA-BOOM—!
Blinding, searing-white lightning bleached the world into monochrome, filling the air with the ozone stench of superheated metal.
The thunderbolt crashed directly into the narrow gap between Medea and Illya, the concussive kinetic shockwave violently hurling both sorceresses backward!
High above the avenue, the heavy gray clouds twisted into a massive, swirling vortex as scalp-numbing, divine magical pressure poured from its epicenter.
Moo—!
Two colossal, muscular divine bulls thrust their horned snouts out from the storm clouds.
Treading upon the void with crackling lightning dancing across their hooves, the divine oxen hauled an ancient, bronze-plated battle chariot out of the thunderhead, crashing onto the terrestrial battlefield wreathed in a tempest of roaring arcs!
“Olalalalalalla—!” The conqueror’s booming war cry thundered across the sky alongside the roar of lightning as the Gordius Wheel: Wheel of Heaven’s Authority ground the atmosphere to dust.
Every deafening crack of thunder radiating from the chariot’s bronze wheels carried enough kinetic force to rival the maximum-output strike of a standard Servant.
Had the driver aimed his descent with lethal intent, both Medea and Illya would have been pulverized in the impact.
A wave of electrical numbness surged through Medea’s limbs.
Gliding backward just inches above the pavement, she stabilized her stance behind a swirling wind barrier.
‘Tsk…
they actually intervened.’ Raising her gaze toward the descending conqueror, Medea cross-referenced her Master’s earlier briefing.
Rider.
True Name: Iskandar, the King of Conquerors of Macedonia.
While his individual combat parameters weren’t overly overwhelming, the Noble Phantasms he commanded were exceptionally tricky.
The Gordius Wheel could summon the divine thunder of Zeus himself, while his ultimate trump card—Ionian Hetairoi: Army of the King—was an out-of-specification Reality Marble capable of deploying an entire mythological army.
And riding beside him was an artificial King Arthur vessel wielding the Divine Construct Rhongomyniad.
Contesting them in an open, extended engagement held zero tactical advantage.
Rewinding the clock slightly.
A few moments earlier, atop the high-rise rooftop.
“That red-haired Master intends to execute Einzbern’s Master.” Waver had reached his tactical deduction.
It wasn’t a difficult calculation.
Berserker’s frontline terror was obvious trading blows with the monster was far less efficient than assassinating the squishy summoner in the rear.
And currently, the spatial separation between Heracles and Illya was widening by the second.
That Einzbern homunculus was far too arrogant, strutting openly into the line of fire without basic personal bounded fields.
Though to be fair, the previous generation’s Einzbern had acted the exact same way.
Gazing at Illya’s silhouette, Waver couldn’t help but recall Irisviel von Einzbern, who had fearlessly stood behind Saber during the first battle of the Fourth War.
‘Is suicidal bravado an Einzbern family heirloom?’ Waver muttered in his heart.
Yet there was no time to reminisce about past trauma.
The enemy Servant was an Age of Gods Caster.
Backed by a Master whose martial prowess surpassed Heroic Spirits, capturing the Master and subjugating Berserker into a secondary contract was a walk in the park.
They had to stop them.
“Rider, I propose we intervene and secure Berserker’s Master.” Waver laid out his tactical recommendation.
Strategically speaking, the most cynical, optimal timing to strike would be right after Illya was assassinated, cleaning up the exhausted survivors.
Yet Waver knew his King of Conquerors would never endorse such underhanded, scavenger tactics.
Waver locked eyes with the towering hero, articulating his logic step by step while anxiously waiting for approval.
Perhaps it was lingering insecurity even after becoming a Lord of the Clock Tower, standing before Iskandar always turned him back into that desperate young boy eager to prove his worth.
Rider rubbed his bearded chin, and after a brief heartbeat, broke into a wide, toothy grin.
“Well spoken, boy!” “In that Berserker, I perceive a resonant kinship originating from the supreme godhead.
The lad is undoubtedly the flesh and blood of great Zeus.” “Allowing such a glorious warrior to exit the stage through a cheap assassination would be an absolute tragedy!” “Come!
Let us meddle in this glorious chaos!” Roaring with laughter, Iskandar clapped a heavy hand against Waver’s back, reached down to draw the Sword of Cypriots from his waist, and cleaved the air before him!
Back on the shattered boulevard.
The crimson-haired King drove his chariot onto the asphalt.
The twin divine bulls exhaled heavy plumes of steam laced with crackling electrical sparks, their round, obsidian eyes glaring across the perimeter with ferocious majesty.
Flanking the conqueror were his long-haired strategist and his cloaked disciple, standing tall and imposing like an iron vanguard.
Medea stood fifty paces away, her expression concealed beneath her dark cowl.
Illya sat collapsed against the curb, staring up at the towering chariot in stunned silence.
The battlefield plunged into a dead, suffocating quiet.
Iskandar swept his dark red pupils across the clearing, his gaze lingering on the smoldering, half-regenerated corpse of Heracles.
Surtr’s instantaneous counter-kill had thoroughly shattered everyone’s expectations not even the King of Conquerors had anticipated a Master deleting a demigod’s life in under two seconds.
Yet judging by the little Master’s lack of absolute despair, death was merely a temporary inconvenience for Berserker.
‘A resurrection-type Noble Phantasm, eh?’ Iskandar noted the deduction silently.
Under ordinary circumstances, this was the exact moment where the King of Conquerors would raise his arms, puff out his chest, and deliver a thunderous, charismatic recruitment speech to the surrounding Servants.
Yet the booming words abruptly died on the tip of his tongue.
The jovial grin on his face instantly hardened into razor-sharp vigilance.
The red-haired Master was gone!
Where on earth had that monster vanished to?!
Tightening his grip on the leather reins, Iskandar prepared to kick the Gordius Wheel into high gear at a moment’s notice.
Yet before the oxen could take a step…
Snap.
From an unseen vantage point, a crisp, resonant snap of fingers echoed through the street.
“Berserker…!” Illya’s panicked, bloodcurdling shriek pierced the silence.
Attracted by the cry, everyone whipped their heads toward the crater.
Meeting their vision was a sudden, blinding eruption of divine hellfire!
Even though Heracles’s flesh had nearly reconstituted itself, the lingering crimson embers embedded in his core showed zero sign of fading—instead swelling exponentially!
FWOOSH—!
The blistering heatwave mutated into a roaring, localized firestorm, detonating outward with Heracles as the epicenter!
The roaring inferno spiraled upward, twisting into a colossal, hundred-meter-tall fire tornado that engulfed the entire avenue in an ocean of blinding Muspelheim hellfire!
“Is that…
her Noble Phantasm again?!” “Didn’t she just liberate a maximum-output strike a second ago?!
How can an ordinary human release back-to-back strategic-class armaments without a recharge?!” A thick bead of cold sweat rolled down Waver’s pale forehead as he stared in pure horror at the firestorm coiling around their chariot’s wards.
Just how monstrous was that girl’s mana capacity?!
No…
factoring in her absurd physical strength and demonic obsidian horns, whether she could even be classified as ‘human’ was a massive question mark!
Could she be an ancient, slumbering mystery akin to Gray?!
“Hahaha!
Now this is what I call enthusiastic hospitality!” Standing at the epicenter of the roaring firestorm, the King of Conquerors grinned broadly, wiping a stream of sweat from his brow as his battle lust reached fever pitch.
Deep down, Iskandar couldn’t help but admire the sheer audacity of that red-haired Master.
Even if the girl possessed the monstrous brute strength to wrestle Berserker, to brazenly launch an offensive against two top-tier Servant factions simultaneously took ungodly courage.
He had no idea what her ultimate confidence was anchored to, but the razor-sharp battle instincts honed across decades of blood-soaked conquests screamed that they were in mortal danger.
Without a second of hesitation, Iskandar snapped the leather reins!
CRACKLE—!
Surging arcs of Zeus’s divine lightning erupted outward from the bronze chariot, detonating violently the instant they collided with the encroaching hellfire.
Lightning and flame coiled, clashed, and canceled each other out across the roadway—this was no longer a mere elemental interaction, but a raw, unadulterated collision of pure divine prana.
Probing the firestorm for a fraction of a second, Iskandar locked onto the weakest structural point in the vortex.
Draped in roaring lightning, he drove the divine oxen forward, spearheading a path straight through the wall of fire.
“Berserker, stay right behind them!” Illya, cradled securely in the arms of the newly reconstituted black titan, desperately signaled for Heracles to follow the chariot’s wake.
Just because Heracles could resurrect through fatal burns didn’t mean Illya’s frail homunculus body could survive ten-thousand-degree thermal radiation had Iskandar’s lightning barrier not shielded her flank, she would have been turned into ash on the spot.
She owed the King of Conquerors a massive debt.
Meanwhile, standing completely outside the perimeter of the fire tornado.
Surtr’s piercing violet gaze effortlessly pierced through the roaring blaze, tracking the silhouettes struggling toward the exit.
Pinpointing their exact vector of emergence, Surtr raised her right hand and hurled the crimson greatsword high into the twilight sky.
It was time for the final curtain.