Astrea Melaustea POV
I waved away the smoke from a pipe that wasn't mine, the acrid taste of cheap tobacco settling on my tongue and stinging my eyes. Speaking of my eyes, they found the dealer's. He met my gaze without flinching. It was humorous in a way. For here in Japan, gambling dens, were run by crooks, simple as that.
The gambling den occupied what had once been a shrine, though whatever kami had resided here had long since fled. The walls were stained yellow, the wooden floor worn and scraped from chairs and table.
Paper lanterns hung from the rafters. Then of course was the smell, tobacco and copper underneath it, seriously why did so many people smoke here. Did they not know it made them stink worse than the rats in London's sewers.
And on that note why must the Holy Grail, the cusp of True Magic, the culmination of the Einzbern, Matou, and Toshaka's centuries of research, manifest in a place such as this? Fuyuki was a backwater city, a castle town with few people, less than 40,000 most likely. The cobblestone streets were uneven, the architecture cramped and wooden, and the people... well, the people stared at me like I was some exotic bird that had flown too far from home.
Which, I supposed, I was.
But such were the burdens of duty. The Neutral faction had chosen me, or rather, I was the one person the Grail chose from the Neutral Faction. A referee in a way between the ones the Grail chose of the Aristocratic and newly rising Democratic Factions. In this war patience would be my deciding factor.
My thoughts scattered like startled birds as my eyes landed on the table. The dealer turned over his three cards, I counted them out.
2-4-3.
The smile that had been playing at my lips vanished. I looked at my own cards, the numbers burning themselves into my mind. A 1 from the card in my hand. A 3 from the first turn, which I had bet on. And, yes, I remembered correctly, because I always remembered correctly, a 5 from the second turn. Nine total. The same as the house.
The dealer's smile stretched across his face like a wound, that ugly thing extending from ear to ear. He knew. Of course he knew. He kept on changing whether to take from the card at the top, the one below or the one four places from the top.
Yes that was most definitely it, I couldn't have been unlucky, this entire establishment was designed to separate fools from their money, and I had walked in knowing this and yet somehow convinced myself that luck, that fickle, faithless mistress, would favor me anyway.
A vice, my parents called it. A dangerous addiction that would one day be my undoing. Not sure how it would be my undoing, the Melaustea had more money than most other magus families combined.
The dealer overturned his hand, gesturing for the rest of us to reveal our hidden cards so he could tally the final scores. But his eyes weren't on the other players. They were on me.
I looked around the table, cataloging my fellow gamblers. Men, mostly, their ages ranging from the twenties to the mid-forties. Some with bellies that almost spilled onto the table, soft merchants who had come to chase the thrill of risk.
One man was missing two finger joints on his left hand, payment for a past transgression, no doubt. These crooks were not gentle with those who cheated them. Another had a scar running down his neck, disappearing beneath the collar of his kimono. The one at my left, an older fellow with a patchy gray beard, took a deep drag from his pipe and deliberately exhaled the smoke into my face.
I waved it away, keeping my expression neutral. These men didn't like that a woman, a foreign woman, no less, had dared to enter their domain. They liked even less that I had been winning.
Until now.
"Sorry," the dealer said, though his tone held not a trace of genuine apology. "It seems like all of you lose."
He began to reach for the chips we had placed on each card from the first turn. His fingers, yellowed from nicotine and calloused, those more likely than not from past labor, stretched toward my modest pile, the remnants of what had once been a much larger stack.
I grabbed his wrist.
"Τον ίδιο αριθμό έχουμε," I snarled. "Σήκωσε τα χέρια σου από τις μάρκες μου."
The dealer's eyes widened, then narrowed. Around me, I felt the atmosphere in the room shift.
"Damn foreigner," he spat. "Get your hand off me."
Only then did I realize I had spoken in greek. My native tongue slipped from time to time, english my second language came out much more rarely but it was necessary as it was what was spoken in the Clock Tower. Japanese was my third language, learned specifically for this mission.
I repeated myself, this time in Japanese, though my accent was thicker than I would have liked. "We have the same number. Get your hands off my chips."
He stared into my eyes almost disinterested in my words. Around us, the other players at the table had gone very still. Waiting. Watching. Ready to scatter at the first sign of real violence.
"House rules," he replied, jerking his head toward the ceiling.
I followed his gesture. Inscribed on the wooden beam above us were characters I couldn't read, my Japanese literacy lagged behind my spoken comprehension. But I understood the meaning well enough. The house always wins. Ties go to the dealer.
These were my chips. I had won them, and I would not have them stolen by some jumped-up criminal who thought a few words painted on a ceiling gave him the right to rob me.
My grip on his wrist tightened. Prana fueled me. Reinforcement was a simple spell to learn, however it was incredibly hard to master, I however fell into the latter category. My fingers, now strong enough to crush steel, bit into flesh and bone.
The dealer gasped.
I lifted him overhead, this man who outweighed me by at least forty pounds, and slammed him onto the table. The impact rattled chips and sent cards scattering. The table groaned but held. The dealer, unfortunately, did not handle the experience as well as the furniture. Something in his arm made a wet snapping sound, and he began to scream.
The men who had been dozing in the corners, guards, I now realized, positioned to appear harmless until needed, leapt to their feet. Blades escaped their sheaths. Short and thin in equal measure, katanas, wakizashis, and tantos.
I turned to face them, performing a slight curtsy as I did so, pinching the edges of my dress with fingers that still tingled with reinforcement.
"I am sorry," I began, injecting my voice with as much sweetness as I could muster. "It seems I got quite carried away."
The men who had been sitting at our table, those soft merchants and desperate gamblers, scrambled from their seats, most likely wanting to be anywhere except for being near me.
They fled toward the walls, toward the corners, toward the single door that led to the street outside, they fled like rats.
The armed men, however, did not move. They held their positions, weapons drawn, eyes fixed on me, some scared. After all, what I had done, was not something a human could do. They had seen me throw a grown man as if he weighed nothing. But they had also been given orders, and these people did not tolerate disobedience.
A low, guttural voice cut through the tension.
"Damn foreigner."
I turned toward the source of the sound.
A man stood in the doorway that led to the back rooms. He was in his mid-forties, with the build of someone who had once been athletic and was now beginning to soften. Black-ringed tattoos crawled up his arms, disappearing beneath the sleeves of his kimono. A pipe dangled from his lips, smoke curling upward like incense. And there, running from his hairline to his eyebrow, was a scar, an ugly thing to be sure.
The oyabun if I remembered correctly. The boss. I almost laughed, because of how stereotypical he looked.
"Why hello," I said, keeping the laughter away from my voice. "You must be the owner of this fine establishment. Once more, I would like to apologize for-"
"Apologize?" He took a step forward, his gaze moving from me to the dealer still writhing on the table, clutching his broken arm and whimpering. "We usually don't even let women in here. You should have considered yourself fortunate to breathe the same air as us. And then you do this?"
He gestured toward his man with the stem of his pipe.
He began to walk toward me, slowly at first. However because he moved so slowly, I noticed what hung at his waist, on one side, a katana, on the other, a flintlock pistol, which looked pretty new.
Western weapons were still rare in Japan, even now that the black ships had forced the country open. This man had either acquired his through expensive trade or taken it from someone corpse.
"No, miss," he continued, stopping a few feet from me. "You must pay for your impudence."
"Impudence?" I allowed my eyebrows to rise. "I am one who should be able to march with impunity against you. The mere fact that I am apologizing makes me better than most of my peers."
He looked confused, at my rebuttal. Magi did not typically explain themselves to the mundane. But I was bored, and the war had not yet begun, and there was something almost charming about this man's confidence.
"Not in these parts," he replied.
He cocked his pistol with surprising speed, and I was already moving before he pulled the trigger.
Reinforcement flooded my legs, and I launched myself to the side as the bang of the flintlock split the air. The ball whizzed past my ear. I kicked off from the floor, vaulting over the gambling table in a single bound. As I passed over it, I drove my heel down, sending the heavy wooden surface spinning toward the gathered men. The dealer flew off it with a shriek, landing in a heap somewhere behind me.
I ran past to another table, overturning it and pressing my back against it to use as cover. My hands fished through the pockets of the jacket I wore over my dress. My fingers found what they were looking for, a gemstone. A sapphire, specifically.
Another bang. The flintlock again. The ball punched through the table above my head, showering me with splinters. He had loaded another shot already? The man was fast if anything.
I heard footsteps. The other men, approaching. Surrounding me.
Alteration. That was my specialty. A somewhat intermediate step between Reinforcement and Projection, the art of giving an object properties it did not originally possess. Other magi could strengthen what already existed or create pale imitations of the ideal. I could transform.
I whispered my incantation into the gemstone, the words less magical formula and more mental trigger, a way of focusing my intent.
"Lightning Manifest."
I felt its structure shift as Prana flowed through it. My command over it perfect. I threw it over the table. It arced through the air, trailing faint sparks, and clattered to the floor somewhere in the center of the room.
I snapped my fingers.
The world turned white.
Lightning erupted from the gemstone, branching, seeking and hungry. It leapt from body to body, following the path of least resistance, finding hearts and stopping them, finding brains and searing them, finding flesh and charring it black. The control was imperfect, I had never been as precise as my instructors wanted, but I managed to bend the worst of it away from my position.
The screams were brief. The smell of burning flesh was not.
When the light faded and the thunder stopped echoing in my ears, I rose from behind the table and surveyed my work.
They were all dead. Every single one of them. Customers, guards, the oyabun with his flintlock and his tattoos and his scar, all reduced to smoking husks. Their bodies had already begun to emit the acrid stench of charcoal. Some were still recognizable, most were not.
I dusted myself off, picking splinters from my sleeve. My ears were ringing. My hair had come loose from its pins and fallen across my face. I probably looked a mess. Damn mundanes, I just wanted to gamble a bit, now look what you made me do.
I prepared to alter the air itself, to strip away the smell of death before it could settle into my clothes, but movement caught my eye.
One man still lived.
He huddled in the corner, clutching a katana to his chest. His sword hand was charred, blackened flesh, blistered and weeping, but aside from that, he appeared unharmed. His eyes were wide, fixed on me, not that I could blame him, it was most definitely terrifying to most people.
"You're a lucky one," I remarked.
His mouth opened and closed. He tried to speak, but the words came out as fragments, shattered by fear.
"Fore... mam..."
"Shush." I raised my index finger to my lips. "Lady luck decided you would survive, so I will not kill you. That means you have two options. One: run. Run away from this place and never look back, because it is about to become much, much worse. Two: follow. Follow me, and I will pay you more than even a daimyo earns. I have always enjoyed having lucky people around me, their fortune tends to be contagious. Not really the case here, but I am lucky myself so it counteracts." I smiled. "So, what is your choice, my lucky fellow?"
He stared at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, he lowered his head in a bow.
"Perfect," I said. "Lucky and smart."
I reached out to scratch his disheveled hair but before my fingers could make contact, the doors to the shrine burst open with a tremendous boom.
"Madame Astrea, please-"
Two voices spoke in perfect unison, then fell silent as their owners took in the carnage.
I turned to face my butlers. Remus and Romulus stood in the doorway, their identical brown eyes sweeping across the room. Twins, both in their mid-fifties, they had served my family since before my birth. They looked almost exactly alike, the same short brown hair styled in military cuts, the same weathered faces, the same broad shoulders beneath impeccable suits, distinguished only by the fact that Remus was clean-shaven while Romulus wore a small goatee.
Remus carried a single suitcase, cradled carefully in both hands. Romulus bore everything else, my luggage, my clothes, a collection of objects imbued with Mystery that represented a significant portion of my family's investment in this war.
"Madame Astrea," Romulus said, his voice carefully neutral. "You cannot keep running off without us to gamble. You are nearly twenty years of age. Your parents have made their feelings on this vice quite clear."
"Oh, I know." I tidied my hair as best I could, tucking loose strands behind my ears. "I simply had to get it out of my system before the war begins in earnest. I must be focused, after all." I gestured at the ruined shrine around us. "Besides, this will make an excellent base of operations. It sits on the outskirts of Fuyuki, equally distant from both the Einzbern and Matou estates." I nodded toward my survivor. "I even acquired a follower. Isn't that right?"
A thick, tearing sound interrupted me.
I looked down.
Remus, who had been holding only a suitcase a moment before, now held a katana in his free hand. The blade was buried to the hilt in my follower's mouth, having entered through his open lips and exited through the back of his skull. Brain matter clung to the steel. Fragments of bone. A great deal of blood.
The man's body crumpled to the floor. The pool of crimson began to spread immediately, seeping into the gaps between the floorboards.
"That's disappointing," I said. "I thought he was lucky."
I took a seat on one of the few chairs that had survived the lightning, crossing one leg over the other and resting my cheek on my palm. Around me, the dead continued their silent vigil.
"Remus," I continued, my voice returning to it's usual monotone. "Please hand me the Mystic Code, then begin cleaning up this place and preparing my quarters. Romulus, you will assist me in establishing the necessary Bounded Fields."
"Madame," Romulus spoke up before either of them could move. "Perhaps the summoning should take priority. Our intelligence suggests that no Servants have yet been called into this war. If you act now, you may have your choice of optimal classes."
I considered this. He was right, of course. The advantage of summoning first was significant but because the Servant I summoned could come in any of the classes it had available.
"Very well," I said, rising from my seat. "Please bring me the catalyst."
Romulus nodded. Remus set down the suitcase, the Melaustea family's Mystic Code, Gemini, a device capable of replicating any inanimate object given sufficient materials of equivalent Mystery and my own blood, and began the grim work of disposing of bodies.
I walked over to the corpse of my would-be follower. His blood was still warm, still spreading. I knelt beside him and placed my fingers in the pool of crimson.
"Slipping Manifest," I whispered.
The blood responded to my will. It flowed across the floor as if alive, drawing itself into precise geometric shapes, circles within circles, runes at the cardinal points, binding sigils at the intersections. A summoning array was soon laid out in front of me.
When it was complete, I wiped my hands on the dead man's clothes and stood.
Romulus appeared at my side, pressing something into my palm without being asked. A piece of cloth. Stained with blood, though from who I could not be quite sure. The catalyst for my Servant, a fragment of the clothing worn by one of the greatest warriors of the Trojan War.
I didn't know if this hero could win me the Grail. That wasn't my purpose here. My role was to ensure balance, to prevent either faction from gaining supremacy. But I did know that the warrior this cloth had belonged to was formidable. Feared by enemies and allies alike. A lion on the battlefield.
I placed the catalyst at the center of the summoning circle and began the incantation.
"Fear you instilled."
The blood began to glow.
"Strength you earned."
"Surge forth from the pit you were placed in."
"Battle and gain glory once more."
The temperature dropped. My breath misted in front of my face.
"Ask me not, as my duty is clear, just as it was for you."
Even though the Grail was the one actually summoning, I could already feel the effort maintaining this Servant would cost me.
"Come forth, the Lion of Achaeans."
The circle blazed with golden light, bright enough that I had to shield my eyes.
"Heed my call, for together we will need to endure, as you once endured!"
The light exploded outward.
For a moment, there was nothing but radiance. It filled the ruined shrine. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the light collapsed. Darkness rushed in to fill the void. Then, gradually, shapes began to well... take shape. A figure crouched at the center of the circle.
They were positioned like a lion ready to pounce, one knee on the ground, weight forward, muscles coiled for explosive movement. They wore armor of blazing gold, not solid metal, but something liquid. Fire rolled off them in waves, licking at the wooden floor without burning it. I myself couldn't even feel any heat coming from it.
In their grip was a spear. Bronze. Eight feet long.
He rose.
He was shorter than I had expected, in fact he was shorter than me. But as I felt the contract fully take shape, I noticed the amount of prana I had to supply.
Orange eyes met blue.
I could make out little else through the blazing helm, just those eyes. That, and his hair, orange, the same shade as his eyes unfurling from beneath the helm in a ponytail that cascaded down their back.
"Master," he said. "I am Lancer."
The voice was clear and strong.
And unmistakably feminine.
The helm dissolved in a swirl of golden fire, revealing the face beneath.
Sharp features, along with sun-darkened skin. A small scar at the corner of their lips. My mind, usually so quick and sharp, ground to a confused halt, so much so I hadn't noticed the Command Spells appear at the back of my hand.
"You're..." I heard myself say, my voice strange and distant in my own ears. "A woman?"
Who the hell had I summoned!!!!?????
Lady Luck what have you done to me!!!?????
A/N: This chapter is much longer 3.5k words, so be grateful whoever may be reading this cause I'm beat and this took me way too fucking long. Fuck, now I gotta stay awake until 1 to study what I should have. May I repeat, fuck.
Either way, send those stones. Thx for reading. Author out.