Ritsuka clamped her hand around Griswald's bicep with a grip that bruised. Her amber eyes sparkled with a wild, adrenaline-fueled thrill as she yanked him forward.
"You don't have to tell me twice!"
She dragged him into a desperate sprint, her vibrant orange ponytail whipping against her athletic shoulders. Griswald stumbled over the uneven cobblestones, his boots skidding on ash and shattered crystal.
Griswald twisted his torso to look back over his shoulder, his lungs burning from the corrupted air.
"Mash, you need to follow us right now!"
The Shielder hoisted Jeanne's limp form higher against her side, her skin-tight black and purple combat suit stretching taut across her generous curves. The deep navy bodysuit clung to her torso, highlighting the rapid rise and fall of her chest as she pivoted on her heel.
"I am right behind you, Senpai!"
Mash kept her massive cross-shaped shield angled toward the plaza, her thigh-high boots crunching against the debris. Jeanne's head lolled against Mash's collarbone, the saint's silver armor clinking against the metal with every jarring step.
A guttural scream tore through the ruined plaza, vibrating deep within Griswald's chest and rattling his teeth. Jeanne Alter stood amidst the settling dust, her golden eyes wide with a sadistic, overwhelming fury. The thick black fur mantle around her shoulders bristled as she gripped her cursed battle standard, her knuckles turning white beneath her dark gauntlets.
"You actually think you can just walk away from me?"
Alter launched herself forward, her armored boots cracking the pavement beneath her sheer explosive power. Crimson flames licked up the shaft of her weapon, casting a hellish, sensual glow over her pale, porcelain face. She closed the distance with terrifying speed, her gaze locked entirely on Mash and the helpless Ruler draped across her shoulder.
The crystalline knights stepped directly into her violent path. Three glass soldiers raised their transparent blades, forming a solid wall of faceted ice and blinding light. Alter slammed into them with the force of a siege engine, her heavy chest heaving with exertion and rage. The impact shattered the first knight into a thousand glittering shards, but the second and third thrust their weapons forward, catching her dark armor and halting her devastating momentum.
"Get out of my way, you cheap parlor tricks!"
Alter swung her flagpole in a vicious, sweeping arc, decapitating the second knight in a shower of sparkling dust. But they would not stay down for long and soon the broken glass began reforming, crawling back together across the cobblestones to rebuild the fallen sentinel.
The mystery girl who could only be a servant skipped alongside Griswald and Ritsuka, her massive red mushroom hat bouncing with every light, effortless step. She clapped her gloved hands together, her large blue eyes crinkling with pure delight.
"My wonderful knights will keep the grumpy witch busy for a little while!"
The girl in the red hat ran backwards alongside them, bare arms sweeping through the air in wide, gleeful arcs, like a dancer calling figures at a ball.
The ruined street answered her.
Glass burst from the cobbles in a dozen places at once. Knights hauled themselves up out of the shattered facades, out of the ash drifts, out of the very stones, clear bodies igniting with firelight as they rose with blades already swinging. Ten of them. Twenty. Every one wore the same frozen silhouette, a slender frame beneath a cavalier's sculpted hat.
"Go, my darlings! Show that horrid witch what France thinks of her!"
They closed on Jeanne Alter from every side at once.
She met the first with her black sword and sheared it in half at the waist. The second took her standard's spearhead through the chest and burst into a chiming shower. The third and fourth came in together, crystal blades scything at her knees and her throat, and she bathed them both in a gout of black-red flame that turned their clear bodies cloudy, then molten, then slag hissing down the cobbles.
"You would throw glass at me. Glass, against the Dragon Witch."
The fifth knight scored a bright line across her vambrace before she turned. The sixth pinned her torn cloak to the earth with its blade, and in the half breath that cost her, three more hacked at her back. If it did anything to her she did not show it as she ripped free and carved the whole cluster apart in two savage arcs, shrieking as she swung.
Griswald watched the shards fall as he ran. They did not lie still. They crawled across the scorched stone, hunting each other, fusing, and the fallen knights dragged themselves upright again with seams of light running through their bodies like cracks healing in reverse.
"They keep getting back up." Ritsuka's voice pitched between horror and delight. "She can't kill them fast enough!"
Across the plaza, the Rider met her own ring of knights with empty hands.
Her first punch folded a knight around her fist and blew it apart from the inside, shards no bigger than sand. Her palm strike detonated the second before its blade finished falling. She moved through them the way a thresher moves through wheat, every blow compact and total, born inside the last inch of travel.
But there were always more. Glass hands caught her mantle and held. A faceted blade opened a line across her shoulder. She shattered the offender with an elbow, wheeled, and found three more stepping over the pieces of their brothers. Her luminous smile thinned into something that had to work for its keep.
"Oh, you persistent little things."
She stamped one armoured shoe and drove her fist through a knight's guard, and the force carried on into the cobbles beneath and cratered them. That knight came apart too fine to reform. The circle tightened around her anyway, blades thrusting from four directions, and she vanished inside a thicket of crystal and a storm of fists.
The duelist in teal had not moved at all.
Knights ringed them on every side, their own face staring back a dozen times over in frozen glass, and the rapier hung from their fingers like a thing forgotten. One blade opened a cut across their arm seemingly not aiming to kill. They did not parry. Blood ran down the pale cuff and dripped from their knuckles, and they only stood there, gazing past the whole battle at the girl in the red hat, and the look on that lovely face was grief so complete it barely looked human.
Their lips moved. Across the plaza, Griswald caught the shape of the words.
"Your Majesty."
The rapier slid from their fingers and stuck point-first in the ash.
"Berserker-Saber, what are you doing?" Alter's voice cracked across the plaza like a whip. "Kill them! I command you to kill them!"
The duelist did not answer. They did not even turn their head. Another knight's blade kissed their shoulder and they took it the way a man takes rain, shoulders bowed, eyes shining and fixed.
Something in Alter's face curdled past rage into something rawer.
"So be it." She wrenched her sword out of a dissolving knight and drove her standard into the cobbles hard enough to split them. "Your all fucking useless!"
She flung her head back and screamed up into the smoke-choked sky.
"Fafnir, come down to me! Burn them! Burn the street, burn the glass, burn all of it!"
Overhead, the great green dragon folded its wings.
Griswald felt the shadow before he saw it, a cold hand closing over the plaza. The beast dropped out of its lazy circle and fell like a tower coming down, jaws hinged wide, and deep in its throat a light kindled, green-white and swelling. Furnace heat rolled ahead of it in waves that reached Griswald from a hundred meters off and stole the moisture from his eyes.
"Oh, that is a very rude dragon!" The girl stamped her white boot mid-stride.
The silver hair girl planted both hands on her hips and glared up at the diving dragon as though it had insulted her hat.
"Amadeus! Music, s'il vous plaît! Something with strings if you please!"
The tall man beside her sighed with theatrical suffering, pale fingers already reaching into his golden-lined cloak.
"Strings, she says. For a dragon. The audiences I must endure."
He takes his slender conductor's baton and swept it through the air.
Light answered.
It burst from the baton's tip in golden ribbons, unfurling as it climbed, stretching and plumping into small winged figures. A dozen of them, round and glowing and utterly faceless, their heads smooth as eggs. Each clutched an instrument made of the same hard light. Violins. A cello. Trumpets, a hunting horn, a little drum strapped across a fat belly.
"Up, up, my darlings. Fortissimo."
The cherubs shot skyward in a loose swarm and broke around the dragon's head like startled starlings. Then they began to play.
The music struck Griswald's chest like a warm hand. Strings soared over the ruined town, a courtly dance performed inches from a monster's face. Two cherubs sawed at their violins directly before the dragon's eyes. A third hovered beside its ear and blasted a trumpet solo.
The dragon's pupils contracted to slits.
Its jaws snapped shut on empty air. The cherub that had been there a heartbeat earlier pirouetted away without missing a note. The dragon lunged again, and again, head whipping left and right, the music swirling around its skull in maddening circles.
Then it exhaled.
Green-white fire roared upward, a geyser of heat that turned the air to shimmering waves. The cherubs scattered in every direction, still playing, the tune somehow unbroken. Flame washed through the space they had occupied and caught nothing but smoke.
"Fafnir, no!" Jeanne Alter's scream tore across the plaza. "Them! Burn THEM, you brainless lizard!" Gesturing in furry at the escaping group.
The dragon had stopped listening. It banked hard, wings hammering the ash into spirals, and tore off after the fleeing orchestra. The cherubs led it away over the rooftops in a bobbing, glowing line, violins trailing behind them like comets, the music thinning into the smoke-choked sky.
The girl in the red hat clapped with delight.
"Magnifique! Even dragons are enchanted by your music my friend!"
"It will not hold him long." The composer twirled his baton perfectly cheerful. "He will eat them one by one, and there are only twelve. A minute, perhaps two, if the cellist is quick on his feet. I suggest we spend that minute running."
"Then we run! Vite, vite!"
Griswald ran.
His boots hammered the cobbles. Ritsuka pounded along at his shoulder, breath sawing in her throat. Ahead of them Mash carried Jeanne without slowing, the saint's armored body braced against her side, the great shield riding her back. The girl in red led them down a street of burned houses, her huge hat bobbing, and the composer jogged behind with his enormous cloak gathered over one arm like a man late for the opera.
Behind them, Alter's voice cracked across the plaza.
"Saber-B! Get up! Get UP, that is an order! Rider-B! Stop playing with your food and go after them!"
Griswald risked one glance back.
Saber-B knelt in the ash where the glass knights had left them. The rapier still stood where it had fallen, point buried in the cinders. Their head hung low, golden hair curtaining that beautiful face, and blood slid down one pale cuff and dripped from slack fingers. They did not rise. They did not answer. Their shoulders shook once, and their hand curled slowly into the ash, and that was all.
Across the plaza, Rider-B's fist went through a knight's chest and out its back.
She tore her arm free in a spray of shards, caught a second knight by the head, and hurled it bodily through a third. The street rang like a struck bell.
"Oh, my deepest apologies!" She drove her heel through a breastplate and the knight burst like a dropped chandelier. "I would love to chase them, truly I would, but these little gentlemen simply refuse to let me leave!"
A crystal blade opened her sleeve. She laughed, caught the knight's arm, and wrenched it off at the shoulder.
"As you can see, I am dreadfully, dreadfully busy."
Her smile had stretched somewhere past joy. Her eyes shone like a child's on a festival day. Four knights came at her together and she met them with open arms.
Alter's shriek of fury chased Griswald around the corner and out of the plaza.
"Senpai, left!" Mash cut down an alley without breaking stride, shield-first, and a fallen beam splintered across her guard as she bulled through it.
Griswald followed, lungs burning, Jeanne's silver armor flashing in the corner of his vision with every jolt of Mash's stride. The saint stirred once, murmured something in her sleep, and went still again.
The last houses fell away. The road became a dirt track, then a slope, and then the treeline swallowed them whole.
Darkness closed over Griswald's head. Branches clawed his face. He ran on, crashing through ferns, his boots sliding on needles and loose loam. The girl in red wove between the trunks as though she knew every root by name, and the composer followed, humming along to the distant music with his cloak bunched in his fist.
Overhead, far away now, the tune thinned. A trumpet cut off mid-note. Then the drum went silent.
"The cellist is gone," the composer announced, almost fond. "He was always the slow one."
A roar rolled over the forest canopy, closer, and furious.
"Keep moving!" Ritsuka shoved Griswald between the shoulder blades and he stumbled forward, catching himself on a sapling, and ran.
The forest closed its fist around them.
Griswald ran with one arm up to guard his eyes, branches raking his sleeve, roots snatching at his boots. The trunks came thicker with every stride, oak and beech crowding shoulder to shoulder, and the canopy knitted itself shut overhead until the sky vanished behind a ceiling of leaves. The light went green and dim.
Mash bulled through it ahead of him, shield turned sideways, breaking a path with her own body while Jeanne rode limp against her hip. Ritsuka scrambled at his elbow, breath tearing, one hand fisted in his coat as though she could drag them both faster by grip alone.
They did not stop.
Griswald's legs went numb somewhere past the first ridge. His lungs burned. Ash still coated his tongue and every breath tasted of the burned town behind them.
Then the wind changed.
The canopy above them heaved. Leaves ripped loose in a green blizzard, whole branches bending, and the sound came down on them like a collapsing roof, a slow thunder of wings beating the air flat.
"Where are they?" Alter's voice cut through the treetops, high and cracked with rage. "Lower, Fafnir! Get lower, I cannot see through this filth!"
Griswald skidded to a halt behind a beech trunk. Ritsuka slammed into his back. Mash dropped to one knee in the ferns with Jeanne cradled against her, shield hauled overhead, and her violet eyes found his in the gloom.
Above them the dragon swept past. Griswald saw it through gaps in the leaves, a moving darkness the length of a cathedral, and on its shoulders a small black figure standing braced against the wind with her cloak snapping crimson behind her.
"They are in here somewhere. Find them!"
Ritsuka's breath came ragged and loud. Griswald heard his own heart in his ears, heard the wet rasp of Jeanne's breathing, heard a twig crack under someone's shifting weight.
The composer raised his baton.
He did it without hurry, pale fingers turning the slim white rod in a small precise circle, and his lips shaped a word Griswald never heard.
They all went mute.
Griswald's own gasp died in his throat before it reached the air. He felt his chest work, felt his mouth open, and nothing came out. The wind stopped speaking in the leaves. Ritsuka's harsh breathing vanished mid-breath and her eyes flew wide, hands going to her own throat. When Mash's greave scraped bark there was no sound at all, only the sight of it. Even the dragon's wingbeats overhead had been carved out of the world, leaving the canopy thrashing in perfect and impossible silence.
The composer touched a gloved finger to his own thin lips and smiled with enormous satisfaction.
The girl in the red hat clasped both hands under her chin, delighted, and made no noise whatsoever.
The silence belonged only to them.
Griswald understood it the instant he stopped fighting his own throat. The forest still lived. Leaves still hissed above him, a branch still groaned somewhere off to the right, and the dragon's wingbeats still hammered the canopy flat with each downstroke. He heard all of it. He simply could not add anything to it. The composer had cut a circle out of the world and dropped it over their heads, and inside that circle nothing they did made a sound.
Ritsuka slapped her palm against the beech trunk beside his ear. Nothing. She did it harder, teeth bared in something between panic and glee, and the bark shed dust in silence.
Above them the dragon swung back for a second pass.
Wind slammed down. The canopy bent, whole crowns pressed sideways, and daylight came stabbing through in shifting blades. Griswald pressed his spine flat to the trunk and watched a gap open six feet from his boot, sunlight pouring in, ferns flattening under the downdraft. He did not breathe. He could not have been heard if he screamed, and still he did not breathe.
Mash crouched over Jeanne in the fern hollow with her shield canted above them both, its cross edge buried in the loam. Her eyes tracked the moving darkness overhead. Jeanne's braid had come loose and lay across the dirt like spilled gold, her armored chest rising in shallow jerks, blood tacky and black at her shoulder.
The dragon passed. It came back. It passed again, wider, and the third circuit took it out past the ridge.
Jeanne Alter pierced the din from high above with her furious voice.
"I cannot see a single thing through these wretched leaves! "Fine. If I cannot see the rats, I will burn the whole fucking barn. Burn it all! Turn this entire forest to ash!"
Griswald's stomach dropped at her next words.
"Fafnir. Every tree. Start at the north and do not stop until there is nothing left standing between here and the river."
The dragon unleashed a roar that shook the dirt beneath the boots of the fleeing group.
Griswald's mouth opened. His throat worked. The word never left him.
Ritsuka's eyes went round and white-edged. Mash's head snapped up, shield rising on instinct, and her lips moved in a silent shape Griswald read easily enough as no.
The first blast came down half a mile north.
He heard it before he saw anything, a wet tearing roar, and then the world above the northern ridge turned green-white. Light flooded the forest floor. Trunks stood out in stark black relief for a full second before the heat arrived, and the heat arrived like a door slamming, drying his eyes in their sockets, curling the ferns at his ankles.
Fire fell out of the sky.
It came down in a solid column and the canopy simply ceased to exist beneath it. Oaks the width of wagons went up in one breath, sap exploding, whole crowns detonating into orange. The blaze walked south along the ridge as the dragon dragged its head, and everywhere it touched the forest stood up in flame.
Griswald's ear crackled.
"Griswald, we've got a thermal spike on your position, it's massive, that thing is spraying dragon fire across a two kilometer front!" Romani's voice tore at the top of its register. "Answer me! Griswald, say something!"
He could not. He grabbed the communicator and pressed it trying to shaped the words and nothing crossed the gap.
"Mash? Ritsuka? Somebody talk to me!"
The girl in the red hat did not wait for anyone to talk.
She spun on her heel, seized Griswald's wrist in one gloved hand and Ritsuka's in the other, and hauled. She pointed with her chin, hard, downslope and east, and set off through the trees at a flat sprint with her white boots skimming the roots and that ridiculous hat pinned flat by the wind.
The composer went ahead of her.
He ran without appearing to hurry, cloak streaming behind him in a river of gold, and his baton kept moving. Every few strides he flicked it left or right and the girl adjusted, and Griswald understood after the third correction that the man was listening. Not to the fire. To the wind. To the intake, the great wet drag of air into the dragon's throat that came a half second before each burst, and he was listing to it as if it were the only direction he needs.
The baton snapped left.
The girl wrenched Griswald's arm and threw herself sideways behind a rock shelf, dragging both of them down into the dirt, and Mash dove after her with Jeanne clamped to her chest and the shield slung overhead.
Fire came down where they had been running.
It hit close enough to blister the rock. Griswald curled with his face in the moss and felt the heat roll over the shield lip, felt his own hair crisp at the ends, felt the beech he had been about to pass go up as one enormous torch. Sap burst with a crack he felt in his teeth. Burning leaves rained down and stuck to his sleeve and he beat them out with his palm and never made a sound doing it.
Up. Moving again. No one told anyone anything.
They ran through a corridor of burning trunks. The forest floor was a carpet of orange scrap now, needles smoldering. Griswald's eyes streamed. He could not cough. He felt the spasm build in his chest and had nowhere to put it, and his ribs heaved uselessly while he ran.
The baton snapped right.
They cut right. Fire fell left.
The baton snapped left, then left again, then held perfectly still for six strides before it flicked down toward the roots.
Griswald stopped questioning it somewhere past the second ridge. He simply watched that slim white rod and put his boots wherever the girl in the red hat dragged him, and every time fire came down it came down behind them, or beside them, or across the ground they had abandoned three heartbeats earlier. The composer never once looked up. He ran with his head tilted like a man following a melody through a crowded hall, and his hearing kept them alive.
The fire fell for a long time.
Griswald lost count of the near misses. He counted burns instead, the sting on the back of his left hand, the tight shiny patch on his forearm where a falling ember had found bare skin, the raw scrape along his ribs from the rock shelf. His mouth tasted of scorched pine and blood. Twice he went down and twice Ritsuka hauled him up by the collar with a soundless snarl of effort, her face streaked black, her ponytail singed to half its length on one side.
Mash never slowed once. She ran with Jeanne clamped against her chest, the great shield riding her back and taking the falling debris meant for both of them, and her thighs drove her through undergrowth that should have stopped a horse.
Then the heat began to fall behind.
Griswald felt it before he understood it, the difference between running into a furnace and running out of one. The air went from searing to merely foul. The green-white glare stopped painting the trunks ahead of them and started throwing their shadows forward instead. Behind them the forest went on burning, an enormous throaty roar of consumption, and over it rolled a shriek that had nothing to do with fire.
The Dragon Witch screaming at her mount. Screaming at the trees. Screaming at nothing at all.
They ran until the ground tilted down and the trunks thinned than Griswald heard water.
The river was barely worth the name, a shallow ribbon of brown over stones, ten paces wide and cold enough to shock the breath out of him when he hit it. He crashed through knee-deep and felt the cold climb his legs and it was the finest thing he had ever felt. Ritsuka went in beside him and simply sat down in it for a moment, head tipped back, chest heaving. Mash walked through with Jeanne held high and dry, water breaking white around her boots.
The girl in the red hat picked her way across on the stones without wetting a single white boot, arms out for balance, hat tipped rakishly to one side.
Beyond the river the trees grew low and scrubby and the ground turned to soft turf, the burning was a bruise of orange behind them, a mile back and still spreading. The dragon's rage came thin and distant now, a sound in the sky rather than a weight on the shoulders.
The composer finally stopped.
He turned in a slow circle with his head cocked, baton loose in his gloved fingers, listening to something none of them could reach. He held that pose for a long, long moment.
The girl watched him. Then she raised one gloved hand and made a small crisp gesture.
He flicked the baton.
Sound came back so hard that Griswald flinched. Ritsuka's ragged breathing hit the air like a saw, the creak of Mash's armor as she knelt to lay Jeanne down on the turf, all of it flooded in at once, and Griswald bent double and coughed until his eyes ran and it felt like the greatest luxury of his life.
The girl in the red hat clapped her gloved hands together, her bright blue eyes fixed on the tall man.
Oh, magnifique! Magnifique, you wonderful man!" The girl in the red hat spun on her heel and clapped both hands together, her pale silver hair flying in a long bright arc. "You truly are a gift to not only the music world but to us for what you have led us from."
The composer swept his golden-lined cloak back and executed a flawless theatrical bow, his pale fingers resting over his heart.
"You flatter me, my radiant queen, but we are simply fortunate the Throne summoned my ears to be your guide. Had they chosen poor Beethoven, you would all be roasted chestnuts right now, the man could not hear a cannon blast next to his own head."
Griswald tuned out the words and knelt in the damp turf beside the unconscious Ruler. He ran his hands over her silver armor, checking the joints and the dark scorch marks marring the metal. Her pulse beat steady beneath his fingertips. The burns on her shoulder were superficial, angry red welts that his healing magecraft could smooth out in minutes and the damage she took against the witch will not harm her long. He channeled a thin stream of mana into her skin, watching the blistered flesh knit back together into pristine porcelain. The ambient mana of the Singularity made his circuits hum with a pleasant warmth.
The girl in the red hat hovered at his shoulder, her massive mushroom hat casting a wide shadow over the saint.
"Will your dear friend be alright? She looks so terribly fragile when she sleeps."
Griswald wiped soot from the saint's pale cheek and stood up, brushing dirt from his knees.
"Her vitals are strong and the burns are shallow. She will be perfectly fine after some rest."
The girl threw her arms wide, her cream-colored bow bouncing against her silver hair.
"Dieu merci! That is the most wonderful news I have heard all day! C'est un vrai soulagement! I was so worried the horrible witch had damaged her beautiful face."
Mash stepped forward, her heavy shield scraping against the river stones as she lowered it to the grass.
"We owe you our lives. Your intervention kept us from being incinerated in that forest."
The composer chuckled, adjusting his wide purple sash with a casual flick of his long fingers.
"A pleasure to be of service to such resilient survivors. I am Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, at your absolute disposal."
The girl in the red hat offered a deep, elegant curtsy that defied her whimsical outfit, her pale locks spilling over her shoulders.
"And I am Marie Antoinette! It is an absolute delight to meet you all, mes amis. We must certainly celebrate our survival with a proper feast once we find a suitable chateau!"
Griswald stared at the petite woman in the mushroom hat, his brain struggling to reconcile the historical queen with the cheerful idol standing before him. He tried to set those thoughts aside as he could not be rude to royalty.
"I am Griswald Von Garmisch, and this is Mash Kyrielight and Ritsuka Fujimaru. We really appreciate the rescue."
Ritsuka crossed her arms, her singed ponytail swaying as she tilted her head.
Ritsuka stared at the petite woman in the whimsical mushroom hat, her singed ponytail swaying as she tilted her head. Like Griswald the sheer absurdity of the French Queen standing before them in a fairy-tale outfit must have been just as jarring to her as it was for him.
Marie Antoinette clasped her gloved hands together, her vivid blue eyes shimmering with unshed tears as she gazed toward the smoke-choked horizon.
"We are but wandering spirits in this twisted reflection of my beloved homeland." Marie's voice carried a melodic sorrow that made Griswald's chest tighten. "I awoke to find my people slaughtered and my beautiful France reduced to cinders by a monster wearing my hero of my peoples face face."
Mozart stepped closer to the queen, his tall, willowy body moving with an unnatural, fluid grace. His pale, almost translucent skin glowed in the dim light, and his long, silver-blond hair cascaded over the dark, ornate leaves decorating his narrow chest. He rested a slender, gloved hand on her bare shoulder, his narrow pale lips curving into a gentle, reassuring smile.
"Fear not, my radiant queen, for I shall compose a symphony of our enemies' demise." Mozart's pale greenish-gray eyes flashed with a cold, protective devotion. "I followed you into this nightmare to ensure your smile never fades, and I will not rest until this false witch is silenced."
Griswald cleared his throat, straightening his posture and clasping his hands behind his back. The rigorous etiquette lessons his parents had forced upon him during his childhood resurfaced, guiding his tongue as he addressed the monarch. He bowed at a precise forty-five-degree angle, keeping his grey eyes respectfully lowered.
"Your Majesty, we are operatives from the Chaldea Security Organization, tasked with correcting this Singularity to prevent the total incineration of human history." Griswald kept his voice steady despite the overwhelming presence of royalty. "We intend to locate the Holy Grail anchoring this distortion and destroy it, thereby restoring the proper timeline and saving your country."
Marie gasped, her small, softly defined lips parting in sheer delight. She closed the distance between them in three light, bounding steps, the dark ruffled layers of her skirt swishing around her soft, thick thighs. She reached up, her delicate hands cupping Griswald's face as she pressed her soft, porcelain cheeks against his in quick, airy kisses. The sheer proximity brought the intoxicating, sweet scent of expensive perfume straight to his nose.
"Oh, you brave, wonderful souls!" Marie's breath washed warm and sweet against his skin as she moved to kiss Ritsuka and Mash. "To risk your very lives for a ruined kingdom is the noblest act I have ever witnessed!"
Griswald felt a fierce heat rush to his cheeks, his mind short-circuiting at the casual, intimate affection from a literal historical monarch. He had expected cold arrogance and rigid protocol, not this bubbly, radiant girl who treated them like cherished friends.
Mozart chuckled softly, his long, delicate fingers adjusting the wide purple sash at his thin waist. The composer watched Griswald's flustered reaction with an amused, knowing glint in his narrow eyes, clearly entirely unsurprised by his queen's exuberant behavior.
Marie stepped back, her bright blue eyes locking onto Griswald's face with sudden, piercing intensity. She tilted her head, her silver-white bangs shifting across her smooth forehead.
"Tell me, dear Griswald, are you a Master commanding these brave knights?" Marie's tone shifted from playful to earnest.
Griswald nodded, raising his right hand to display the glowing red Command Seals etched into his skin.
Marie clasped her hands over her heart, her petite chest heaving with renewed vigor as she addressed the entire group. The wind caught her long, flowing silver locks, whipping them around her delicate shoulders and the elaborate cream-colored bow atop her mushroom hat.
"Then let us join our fates and march upon this usurper!" Marie's voice rang clear and bright across the riverbank. "I offer you my unwavering devotion to this cause! Will you forge a contract with me and my dearest Amadeus, that we might fight by your side and reclaim our beautiful France?"
A profound silence descended upon the riverbank, broken only by the gentle lapping of water against the stones.
Griswald froze, his analytical mind slamming into a brick wall of absolute panic. He slowly turned his head to look at Ritsuka, whose amber eyes were wide with amusement. Mash stood perfectly still, her violet eyes darting between Griswald and the expectant queen, her lips pressed into a thin, nervous line as a blush gathered in her face. The deep navy bodysuit stretching taut across her own ample breasts as she held her breath.
Marie blinked her large, rounded blue eyes, her soft features scrunching together in genuine confusion as she looked at their rigid postures.
"Is something wrong, my brave Master?" Marie's voice laced with innocent concern. "Have I overstepped my bounds, or is my offer too burdensome for your noble quest?"
Griswald squeezed his eyes shut, a deep, agonizing groan echoing in the confines of his own skull. His family's extensive education in noble etiquette had covered dinner parties, ballroom dancing, and formal negotiations, but it had utterly failed to prepare him for this specific scenario. He had to figure out how to politely ask the Queen of France to strip naked and have sexual intercourse with him to facilitate a mana transfer.