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"Maverick, what the hell are you doing?!"
"Run! You absolute idiot! Do you want to just stand there and be dead weight?!" Maverick's grip on Daisy's wrist was iron-tight as he yanked her into motion. "If we break out of range, we can use a Command Spell to summon our Servants directly to us and escape the encirclement entirely! Think, Daisy, think!"
"Oh! Right! That makes sense! But wait—which direction? And what if Edison sends the robots after—"
"Run first, strategize after!"
Maverick was a veteran of several Holy Grail Wars at this point—not a fresh-faced newbie anymore, not the guy who'd fumbled his way through the early days making every mistake in the book. He'd learned hard lessons, paid for them in Servant lives and Command Spells, and he'd come out sharper, colder, and significantly better at not dying.
The moment Edison had raised his paw to order the mechanical army's betrayal, Maverick had already been moving. He'd recognized the calculus before the order even left the lion's mouth.
Ally dies. That changes the math. Get out of the kill zone.
He grabbed Daisy's hand and sprinted hard toward the treeline at the edge of the commercial district, weaving between burning debris and scattered robot parts.
Daisy stumbled along behind him, initially confused, then cycling through a barrage of questions that absolutely confirmed why she'd earned her nickname in the first place.
"But what about Nero? Should we go back and help? What if Edison targets us next? Do Command Spells work at long range? What if the robots are faster than us? What if—"
"Daisy." Maverick's voice was flat. Exhausted. Resigned.
"Yeah?"
"Stop talking and run."
"Right!"
Maverick let out a long, suffering sigh without breaking stride. "You really are something else, Daisy. I swear."
Down in his stream chat, the viewers were already on to the important things.
[Ship]: Wait, is this a new ship? Maverick x Daisy? I'm calling it right now!
[MVP]: I hereby declare Maverick the MVP of this entire Holy Grail War. No objections will be entertained.
[Objection]: Excuse me?? You're completely forgetting about Viper.
[Laugh]: Viper? That roadside scrub who got knocked into the ocean? He died ages ago. Only the living get to have KDA discussions, my friend.
[Voice]:Sore wa dou ka na~ (Is that so~?)
[Nani]: ...NANI?!
As the chat flooded with a cascade of question marks and confused reactions, Maverick burst through the final layer of the mechanical army's encirclement, breaking into open space beyond their effective firing range.
He skidded to a halt, chest heaving, dragging Daisy to a stop beside him.
He bent forward, hands on knees, finally catching his breath.
But before he could even straighten up, a figure stepped out from the shadows of the treeline, moving with deliberate, unhurried calm.
Blocking their path entirely.
Maverick froze.
His hand moved instinctively to his weapon—
And then stopped.
Because the figure just stood there, completely relaxed, adjusting his gloves with the easy confidence of someone who hadn't just survived being thrown into the ocean and losing his Servant. Someone who had absolutely nothing left to lose and knew it.
Viper.
"Hello," Viper said calmly, his voice carrying no particular malice—just quiet certainty. "My name is Viper. Just an insignificant streamer, really. Nothing special." He finished with his gloves and looked up, his eyes meeting Maverick's directly. "But right now... I'm going to take both of you down."
Maverick's brain ran the calculus in approximately two seconds.
Mystic Code user. Unknown capabilities. No Servant. But we have no Servants either, and we're both running on empty.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Maverick raised both hands, his voice shifting immediately into negotiation mode. "You're Drake's Master, right? Rider's guy? Listen to me for a second—now is absolutely not the time for infighting! Edison is still back there with an entire army of robots! If we don't consolidate our forces and focus fire on him together, we are all going to die out here! The math doesn't work any other way!"
Viper smiled.
It wasn't a warm smile. It wasn't the polite social kind. It was cold, and quiet, and deeply, deeply satisfied.
"Edison," Viper said simply, "is already dead."
"...What?"
[Flashback: 30 Seconds Ago]
Back at the ruins.
Nero and Elizabeth stood back-to-back in the center of a closing circle of mechanical soldiers, prepared to make their final stand against impossible odds. Two broken idols facing an army, with nothing left but their swords and the refusal to quit.
Edison, drunk on the heady mixture of capitalism, revenge, and the specific joy of watching his enemies suffer, raised his remaining left hand—his dominant hand now, by necessity—to order the final volley.
"Goodbye, obsolete idols!" he announced with theatrical grandeur. "Your run has been entertaining, but the market has spoken!"
SQUELCH.
A pitch-black dagger materialized from nothing—from the absolute absence of light—and thrust forward with surgical precision directly into Edison's thick windpipe, collapsing his airway before he could finish his sentence.
At the exact same instant, Wayne and The Professor—who had been standing to Edison's left and right, watching the show with varying degrees of moral discomfort—suddenly gagged as two swift shadows materialized behind them like smoke given purpose, blades drawing across their throats in a single clean motion.
Twin sprays of red.
"As—Assassin?!" Edison gurgled, blood bubbling up through his severed windpipe, his voice reduced to a wet, clicking rasp. He tried to move—to retreat, to summon the robots, to do something—but his body simply refused. His limbs were unresponsive, locked in place. "When... did they... why can't I... move?!"
"Thanks to you," a voice whispered directly into his lion ear, close enough that he could feel the breath. The voice was calm. Professional. The voice of someone who had died many times and feared it not at all. "You looted the battlefield thoroughly. You took what mattered. But you left the supplies behind."
The dagger twisted slightly, and Edison's vision blurred at the edges.
"The paralytic poison coating those discarded supply containers you ignored? Enough to knock out an elephant. You've been breathing the vapor for the past three minutes."
"Damn... robots..." Edison tried to force the command through his torn throat. "Kill... them—"
"Hundred Faces Hassan," Viper said quietly from the darkness, a few feet away. Not gloating. Just... stating facts.
Specifically, three of the remaining personas of the Old Man of the Mountain—three facets of the same fragmented Servant, each one a distinct individual with their own will, their own face, their own way of moving—had executed this operation with the mechanical precision of professionals who had done this exact kind of work for centuries.
Viper, pursuing his singular obsession with avenging Drake, had formed a temporary contract with the Assassin Servant who had his own scores to settle—his fallen brethren, his abandoned summoning, his incomplete mission.
Two Avengers. Two separate vendettas. One shared enemy.
They'd made a deal.
Behind Edison, two of the Hassan personas stepped forward from the shadows and positioned themselves directly in the line of fire, planting their feet. Shields made of flesh and will.
BRRRRRRRRT!
The robots, processing the threat, opened fire without waiting for a commander's order.
The two Hassans were torn apart instantly—ripped into bloody fragments by the concentrated machine gun fire, their bodies simply ceasing to be recognizable as human. But they held their position for exactly the seconds that mattered.
They bought enough time.
The remaining Hassan—the primary persona, the core—moved without hesitation. He pulled the dagger from Edison's throat in a smooth, practiced motion, circled behind him with ghostlike speed, and drove the blade directly into Edison's Spirit Core through his back.
The most precise possible method. The killing blow delivered without wasted motion.
"My mission is complete," Hassan whispered as the bullets from the now-leaderless robots caught up to him, tearing through his own dissolving form. His voice held no regret. No fear. Only the simple satisfaction of a completed contract. "The rest... is up to you. Mage."
"How... can this be?!" Edison's voice broke as his body began its final dissolution, rage and disbelief warring across his ruined lion face. "I am the President! I am Thomas Alva Edison! I invented the lightbulb! I cannot be struck down by... by..."
He collapsed forward, face-first into the scorched dirt, fingers dragging useless furrows in the earth.
His body dissolved into golden dust that scattered on the wind like burning embers.
The moment his Spirit Core shattered, every single mechanical soldier on the battlefield went dark simultaneously—their power source, their commander, their reason for existence simply gone. They froze mid-motion and then toppled over in cascading clusters, clattering to the ground in heaps of suddenly inert metal.
Silence.
Nero and Elizabeth stood in the center of it all, completely shell-shocked, staring at the space where an army had been a moment ago.
What... just happened?
In the chat, the viewers were equally stunned.
[Silence]: ...
[Processing]: Did I just watch Edison get assassinated?
[Smooth]: That was the cleanest play I've ever seen. No drama. No monologue. Just dead.
[RIP]: Moment of silence for the Hassans who served as human shields. Real ones.
[Present Time]
"We are all Avengers," Viper said, his voice carrying a weight that went beyond the game, beyond strategy, beyond simple competition. "All of our journeys lead to the same shore. The shore of grievance."
He stepped forward, closing the distance between them slowly, deliberately, giving Maverick time to understand what was coming.
"My goal was always simple," Viper continued. "Take down Lu Bu. Avenge Drake. Fulfill my promise to her that I'd win this War." His eyes didn't waver. "Hassan's goal was different—he wanted you, Maverick. Because you killed his Master during the earlier stages of this War."
Viper's right hand moved, and from the pouch at his hip, he produced a flask of silvery liquid metal that caught the limited light in hypnotic, shifting patterns. It moved with a living quality, flowing and reforming, neither fully liquid nor fully solid.
The Volumen Hydrargyrum. Moon Spirit Elixir. An auto-defense Mystic Code of exceptional quality—a construct of magical mercury that could respond to threats faster than human reaction time, covering its wielder in an autonomous shell of liquid metal.
"So we made a deal," Viper said simply. "He helps me kill Edison. I help him kill you."
He met Maverick's eyes directly over the swirling mercury.
"Hassan is dead now. His part of the deal is done. Which means... now it's my turn."
He pointed at Maverick. A simple, direct gesture.
"Don't misunderstand—I'm not asking you to just roll over. Use your Command Spells if you want. Summon your Servants. But think about what that means." Viper tilted his head slightly. "Edison's robots might reactivate when new magical signals start firing. Or you might expose your position to other Masters still out there. Or your Servants might be too injured and depleted from fighting Lu Bu to matter."
He spread his arms in an open gesture, mercury coiling lazily around both hands like living jewelry.
"Or... you can fight me. Right here. Right now. 1 versus 2." He let that sit for a moment. "If I win, I honor my promise. If I lose... then consider Edison's elimination my gift to you. You're welcome."
Maverick stared at him.
Viper stared back.
This wasn't calculated bluster or competitive trash talk. This was something rarer and more dangerous—resolve. The specific resolve of someone who has already lost what mattered most to them, processed that loss, and forged it into something sharp and purposeful.
This wasn't really about a game. Not anymore.
It was a promise to a virtual character who had smiled as she faded away. And Viper intended to keep it.
Down in the chat, the energy had completely shifted from chaos to cinema.
[Cinema]: This is genuinely better than most actual movies I've seen this year.
[Cool]: "Our journey leads to the other shore of grievance." That line. That line. It hits different.
[Chuuni]: Viper has ascended. Full anime protagonist mode unlocked.
[Hype]: FINAL MASTER BATTLE! THIS IS WHAT WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR!
[Stats]: Okay tactical breakdown: Viper has a top-tier auto-defense Mystic Code. Maverick has... Daisy.
[Daisy]: "I feel like I'm actively a debuff right now."
[Facts]: Daisy really said "Can I just leave? Would that help?"
Maverick held Viper's gaze for a long moment, running the numbers one final time.
No clean escape route. Summoning Servants is risky. Negotiation is off the table. This guy isn't bluffing.
He gritted his teeth.
"Fine." Maverick's hand moved to his belt. "You want a fight? You've got one."
No hesitation. No wasted words.
He pulled a grenade from his belt, bit the pin, ripped it free with his teeth—and hurled the explosive directly at Viper's chest with every ounce of force he could manage.
BOOM!
The detonation was concussive, violent, a shockwave of heat and pressure that cracked the surrounding pavement.
But a grenade wasn't enough. Not against this opponent.
Viper's Moon Spirit Elixir responded before the device had even completed its arc through the air. The mercury split in two autonomous streams—one shooting forward like a silver spear to intercept the grenade and detonate it prematurely mid-air, the other instantly reforming into a smooth, curved shield that caught the resulting shrapnel without a scratch reaching Viper's body.
Click.
The Mystic Code reset itself, flowing back around his hands like water returning to its natural state.
Viper didn't even flinch. He simply stepped sideways with measured, deliberate footwork, keeping the silver shield positioned between himself and Maverick's gun hand. Wary. Specifically wary of the infamous Origin Bullet—that single, devastating round loaded in Maverick's custom revolver that could bypass most magical defenses.
Don't let him get a clean line of sight. Don't give him the angle he needs.
But Maverick wasn't aiming to shoot.
Because that's what Viper was expecting.
While the detonation blast and the swirling smoke and dust completely obscured Viper's vision for a critical half-second, Maverick grabbed Daisy firmly by the arm and dove sideways—not forward, not back, but hard left into the dense treeline at the forest's edge.
Branches whipped at his face. Leaves scattered. Roots tried to trip him.
He didn't slow down.
"Move!" he barked at Daisy, already calculating trajectories, sightlines, cover positions.
Fighting a Mage with an auto-defense Mystic Code in an open field with clear lines of fire was suicide—the mercury would intercept anything he threw at distance, and he'd just be wasting ammunition. Maverick knew exactly what his strengths were, and open ground wasn't one of them.
But a jungle?
Close quarters. Unpredictable terrain. Broken sightlines. Short engagement distances where reaction time mattered more than automated defense systems.
The shadows closed around them like a welcome embrace.
Maverick's breathing slowed. His eyes adjusted. His mind shifted into a different gear—colder, quieter, more patient.
He was a guerrilla fighter.
And the jungle was his playground.
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