Dark, damp, and suffocatingly muggy, the stale subterranean air reeked with an acrid stench, as if they had crawled straight into the gullet of some subterranean behemoth.
That was Surtr’s very first impression of the Great Cavern.
‘Honestly, this looks like the textbook lair for a final boss.’ Passing through a winding, moss-carpeted stone tunnel, the duo first emerged into a cavernous underground chamber.
It wasn’t the actual Greater Grail ritual site just yet.
Surtr reasoned this was likely the underground arena where Saber Alter and Medusa had their epic showdown in the Heaven’s Feel timeline.
You could practically call it a legendary Nasuverse tourist attraction.
‘Does wandering around here count as an anime holy land pilgrimage?
Or rather, haven’t I been on a nonstop pilgrimage since the moment I woke up in Fuyuki?’ Without stopping to take photos, the two pressed onward as the subterranean corridor steadily narrowed.
“Master, you seem remarkably well-versed in the intricate workings of the Holy Grail War.” Perhaps finding the oppressive silence a bit too heavy, Medea broke the quiet.
“I only know the broad strokes and the current state of affairs.
When it comes to hard-core occult theory, I’m practically illiterate.” “Then…
what is the wish you hope to entrust to the Holy Grail?” “I don’t really have any personal wish to ask of the Grail.
If I had to name one, it’d be using the Grail’s horsepower to grant other people’s wishes.” Surtr didn’t bother beating around the bush.
It wasn’t something worth hiding anyway.
Medea froze in her tracks, her tone thick with genuine incredulity.
“Are you pulling my leg, Master?” Could her new Master secretly be some benevolent saint?
She certainly didn’t give off that holy vibe.
While Medea had never personally met a Christian saint, she highly doubted any pious maiden would spend thirty uninterrupted minutes admiring her own chest in front of a mirror every morning.
“I’m dead serious.” Surtr gave a casual shrug.
“Just look at it as me harvesting power whenever I fulfill other people’s desires.
But since my own divine powers are currently capped, I want to use the Holy Grail as a convenient shortcut.” “I see…” As a high-ranking sorceress hailing from the Age of Gods, Medea’s magical horizons were vast.
She had indeed heard of ancient magi who manifested miraculous authorities precisely by realizing the prayers of others.
Perhaps her Master belonged to a similar esoteric lineage.
“Well, I’ve shared my goal.
Now it’s your turn.” A proper conversation required a two-way street, though in truth, Surtr had already received the spoiler from her interface.
[Client: Medea] [Quest: Return to her homeland] [Rewards: Primogems ×1500, Random Reward ×3] The witch’s new wish had triggered the moment Surtr completed the first survival quest, functioning exactly like a chained narrative questline.
Chatting back and forth, the two gradually approached the subterranean nexus.
After walking several dozen more paces, the cramped cavern suddenly expanded into a breathtaking expanse.
A colossal underground dome vastly larger than a professional football stadium unfolded before their eyes.
At the far end of the abyss stood a massive, monolithic stone pillar anchoring the cavern floor directly to the ceiling above.
Barring any bizarre deviations, that had to be the absolute core of the Heaven’s Feel ritual.
The sacred altar where Justeaze Lizrich von Einzbern had sacrificed her physical form to become the core of the Greater Grail.
Surtr took point, resting her hand warily upon Lævateinn’s hilt.
Even though her instincts picked up zero immediate hostiles, keeping one’s guard up in a cursed cavern that looked like an ancient necropolis was just common sense.
“Relax, Master.
‘She’ shouldn’t be conscious at this stage.
There is no need to be quite so tense.” Medea let out a soft, amused chuckle.
“Even though I only mentioned the mud’s corruption to you last night, why do you look like you’ve visited this cavern a dozen times before?” “Let’s just say I have decent deductive reasoning.
Piecing a few puzzle pieces together isn’t rocket science.” In the end, it turned out to be a total false alarm.
Even after the pair walked directly beneath the towering ritual pillar, not a single drop of shadow mud stirred.
Breathing a quiet sigh of relief, Surtr circled the perimeter of the stone pillar.
Aside from an overwhelming, oppressive hum in the ambient mana, her novice eyes couldn’t decipher the intricate leyline circuits carved into the rock.
She might possess fragments of the fire giant’s combat instincts, but that only covered the most primitive, destructive applications of thermal energy.
To an apocalyptic giant of Muspelheim, why waste brain cells studying intricate spellcraft when swinging a flaming blade solved all problems?
If Medea was a tenured grandmaster academician of the Mage’s Association, then Surtr was an elementary school dropout who barely knew her ABCs.
For this underground expedition, she had firmly embraced her role as Medea’s muscle bodyguard.
Medea paced around the base of the ritual pillar, occasionally tapping the crystalline tip of her staff against the bedrock, channeling delicate pulses of divine prana into the foundation to diagnose the structure.
Waiting around was mind-numbingly boring.
It felt like a brawny foot soldier assigned to babysit a nuclear physicist in a lab aside from carrying heavy luggage, there was literally nothing to do.
And she didn’t even have luggage to carry, since Medea floated everything with telekinesis anyway.
Left with zero tasks, Surtr spent the downtime communicating with Lævateinn.
Within her spiritual awareness, the greatsword indeed harbored a dormant, hazy sentience, though it remained sluggish and somewhat confused.
If she mapped it to original Arknights lore, the blade housed a primordial remnant of the Fire Demon.
Considering her apocalyptic dreams, it was probably a slumbering sliver of the mythological Fire Giant Surtr himself.
In fact, a massive portion of Surtr’s current superhuman stats and incinerating firepower stemmed directly from this legendary blade.
Much like a Servant wielding their core Noble Phantasm.
She just had no idea what kind of karmic price the sword demanded she was old enough to know that free lunches didn’t exist.
Her emotions were a bit mixed.
‘Well, considering I’ll be hopping to another universe once this Holy Grail War wraps up, who cares?
Even a Norse Fire Giant can’t cross multiversal dimensional barriers to collect debt, right?’ Tossing the lingering anxiety out the window, Surtr watched as a glowing, black-and-crimson magic circle expanded outward from the stone pillar, rippling right up to the tips of her boots.
“Medea?” Thinking the corrupted mud had suddenly gone haywire, Miss Surtr nearly jumped three feet into the air.
She whipped her head toward Medea, only relaxing when she saw the witch maintaining total composure.
It was just standard diagnostic spellcraft.
“No need to panic, Master.
I am merely dissecting the underlying ritual architecture.” Medea spoke with reassuring confidence, though her expression was noticeably solemn.
“So…
what’s the verdict?” Surtr asked.
“The purification itself isn’t fundamentally impossible.
While an absolute conceptual entity like ‘All the Evils of the World’ is absurdly dense, conceptual curses possess glaring conceptual vulnerabilities.” Medea nodded thoughtfully before furrowing her brows.
“However, the black mud has thoroughly marinated throughout the entire Greater Grail infrastructure over the past sixty years, causing structural deterioration at the root level.” “It’s like a goblet of poisoned wine.
Not only has the liquid spoiled, but the chalice itself has absorbed the venom into its pores.” “To safely bypass the corruption, I require complete engineering blueprints and operational data on this ritual.” Medea laid out her technical requirements.
The issue was severe, but far from insoluble.
It was just that the Heaven’s Feel ritual was colossal in scope.
Reconstructing sixty years of three-family spellcraft from scratch would take months securing ready-made blueprints was infinitely faster.
“Ritual data, huh…
I certainly don’t have that in my pockets.
The core design schematics of the Holy Grail War are locked inside the vaults of the Three Founding Families.” Surtr rubbed her chin, slipping into deep thought.
If they wanted the data, they had two options: politely ask to borrow it, or…
Perform an aggressive tactical robbery.
Considering that no magus in their right mind would ever hand over their family’s ultimate secret, there was only one practical path.
“Looks like our primary targets from here on out will be the Three Founding Families.” Einzbern, Tohsaka, Matou…
since everyone was entered into a lethal battle royale anyway, Surtr felt zero moral guilt about conducting a little home invasion.
And judging purely by her personal preferences, Surtr made up her mind in half a second: the Matou clan was getting raided first.
And she’d gladly squash some repulsive bugs while she was at it.
If judged by modern societal ethics, magi were the exact type of demographic where executing all of them might falsely convict one innocent, but executing nine out of ten would definitely let a few war criminals slip through the cracks.
Especially a rancid, maggot-infested old corpse like Matou Zouken who committed horrifying atrocities just to cling onto pathetic immortality.
If she incinerated that bastard into cinder, the Fuyuki Police Department ought to award her a national hero medal.
“Do you need anything else besides data blueprints?” Surtr asked.
“Given that I will need to construct a counter-ritual circle on a grand scale, I require a substantial hoard of high-grade magical catalysts and gemstones.” ‘Great.
Another batch of loot added to the burglary list.’ “Furthermore, in addition to the Greater Grail anchoring the leylines, this system relies on a mobile Lesser Grail to harvest defeated Heroic Spirits.
We must secure possession of the Lesser Grail as well.” As expected of Medea after just a cursory scan of the leylines, she had already deduced the existence of the mobile collection vessel.
“I actually know exactly where the Lesser Grail is hiding.
But ‘she’ might be slightly different from the inanimate chalice you’re imagining.” “She?” Medea instantly caught the curious pronoun Surtr used.
Could this Holy Grail actually be a living woman?