Chapter 18. Thaumaturgy Battle: Rin vs. Flat Escardos
Somewhere by a river in Snowfield.
Despite being near the water, there were no traces of buildings nearby. The river was wedged into a forest, hidden on both sides by trees; naturally, no humans lived in the vicinity, save for a few stray animals wandering down for a drink.
The trees grew in mutual repulsion, leaving a clearing filled with heavy gravel between them and the river.
A sudden blast shattered the silence of the clearing. Using weight-manipulation magecraft, Rin descended gallantly with a momentum far exceeding that of an ordinary human, performing a full rotation to break her fall before coming to a halt.
"You're too slow."
"It's just that Miss Rin is too fast!"
From the woods, a panting Flat arrived late to the scene.
Rin waved her hand dismissively. "Fine, fine. We didn't do a Self-Geas Testimony, but the bet holds, right? I win, I take you back; you win, I stop meddling."
Flat went quiet for a moment, letting out a hesitant "Hmm."
"The condition is a thaumaturgy battle. The rules are—"
"The rules are to fight until the opponent is incapacitated, right?"
Flat cut Rin off to finish her sentence. Additionally, he seemed to be incessantly stroking the high-end watch on his wrist.
"It's okay, I'm going to win! Besides, letting... step in to settle things would be totally uncool!"
Flat was surrounded by a rare atmosphere of combined tension and excitement. He wore an innocent smile, and one could almost imagine a fluffy tail wagging behind him.
"Even though Miss Rin and I are classmates, I've never seen her lose her composure and fight at full strength. Should I call it 'mysticism' or just a lack of strong enemies? From the moment Miss Rin started attending the Professor's classes, she was always so relaxed, she hardly participated in our brawls. This is a magus battle! A legitimate thaumaturgy duel with the disciple of a Magician! Maybe I can force out a more flustered side of Miss Rin—it's a rare opportunity!"
He had been muttering to himself in a small voice for a while now. Though Rin couldn't hear what on earth he was rambling about, even if she had, she would have only concluded that the wires in his head needed reconnecting.
Rin knew Flat was bound to a Servant, but during the long-distance sprint just now, she hadn't detected a single trace of a spiritual body.
She had specifically brushed up on several techniques in the Department of Spiritual Evocation capable of damaging spiritual entities as a precaution, only for the Servant to not even be present.
A whole Servant... surely it couldn't be that watch on his wrist?
"Sigh..."
Rin couldn't help but sigh, accepting the victory conditions despite her slight dissatisfaction.
It was just as well the Servant wasn't here; she could end this cleanly and quickly. Rin had many things to worry about—like Shirou's activities today, Sakura's mood, and the direction of this Holy Grail War. She didn't have time to waste on someone like Flat.
As for Flat himself? Once she squeezed the intel out of him, she'd knock him out before he could use a Command Spell, find Shirou to borrow "Rule Breaker" for a quick stab, and then stuff him onto a private jet back to London. Simple.
"One additional condition: whether you win or lose, you have to give us all the Holy Grail War information you currently possess."
"Yes, ma'am!"
Rin smiled, tacking on the condition without revealing her schemes. A radiant Flat agreed incredibly fast, more eager than a chick pecking at grain.
Actually, this was the truly important part. Lord El-Melloi II's request was just a request; it didn't really matter to Rin if she completed it. If she wanted to be of help to Shirou, information was the most urgent priority.
'This idiot... is he the type who, if you hid a pill inside a piece of bacon, would happily swallow both the bacon and the medicine without question?'
A breeze passed between the two.
As classmates of the same classroom, the distance between them was exactly 100 meters.
The sound of the river's flow was calm and peaceful, while the trees occasionally rustled in the wind, making vague noises. The scene appeared quite removed from the chaotic world of magecraft. Though both magi noticed this, they cast the thought aside.
Flat asked with high spirits:
"Aren't you going to use that sword?"
"You mean... this one?"
When the teasing retort came, Flat rubbed his eyes.
An object manifested in Rin's hand.
Held in her grip was a short sword.
Like her usual gems, its appearance resembled a raw gemstone ore that had been roughly carved, yet it bore no resemblance to any mineral known to exist in this world. The blade was small enough to sway with Rin's movements.
It only looked similar to a gem; its essence was surely worlds apart.
There was only a sense of unity so beautiful one couldn't look away, as if it had merged with her arm; the sword simply existed naturally.
A miracle.
A mysterious structure beyond understanding, where the principles were impossible to discern; one could only imagine it as a creation of nature, yet logic dictated that the sword must be a forged weapon. It was shrouded in a beauty that sucked one's gaze in like a black hole.
It was as if it signaled that only this equally beautiful woman was qualified to wield it.
Until the sword disappeared again, the breathtaking pressure forced a drop of sweat from Flat.
"Relax, relax. I don't need that sword to fight you. Let's see... these should be enough."
Rin pulled a small box from a pocket lining and tossed it. When the box reached its highest point, it hovered in the air and popped open with a click.
Flat watched with a mix of awe and confusion as various tiny objects gleaming with iridescent colors poured out of the box. Those—were all gems.
Large ones. Tiny ones. Irregular ones. Smooth ones. Flat ones. Round ones.
Though not top-grade, every single one was a natural gemstone that would fetch a high price on the market.
Flat's intuition was screaming that something was wrong, but he truly couldn't find a single flaw. Those were definitely gems, they couldn't be anything else. The flood of gems still didn't stop; the number appearing from that box had reached a thousand—no, five thousand.
These gems did not fall upon appearing; instead, they drifted upward. The value of the gems scattered in the sky was enough to buy nearly ten luxury mansions, yet Rin treated them with total indifference.
Flat gradually approached the source of the "wrongness": This feels like the ability of my friend from the Estate Alliance...?
The box closed automatically and fell; Rin caught it with one hand and put it back in the lining.
Flat's eyes could observe the flow of magical energy. His focused pupils noticed that while the gem cluster in the sky formed an exquisite thaumaturgical formula, they showed very little magical trace. Unlike gems charged with massive amounts of prana, these looked like redundant catalysts that each held only a tiny bit of magical energy.
Consequently, Flat breathed a small sigh of relief. However, such an array of catalysts was, conversely, unsettling.
"Thanks to the hard work of a certain Head of Household, I can finally cut loose and complete this formula. The gems here are as numerous as the stars."
Rin's half-joking, soft voice carried over.
The brilliant, multicolored gems arranged themselves in the air behind Rin. They belonged to her as quietly as a starry sky.
"I don't really get it..."
Flat, scratching his hair, felt an atmosphere he was entirely unrelated to and couldn't find a way to cut in. Finally, he gave up on understanding, straightening his arm and gathering magical energy.
Rin nodded calmly with her hands on her hips. Receiving permission, Flat aimed two fingers at the gem constellation.
"Go! (Bullet)"
Two bullets of white-dark magical energy shot from his hand. The two rounds rushed toward the countless gems—only to be blocked by some invisible barrier.
Flat's eyes saw the internal flow of magical energy within the regularly arranged gem cluster shifting violently. It drew out complex magic circles.
The result was gems at specific angles shining, forming a defense using a constantly changing focal point.
"This is hard to interfere with."
Flat muttered to himself, then changed targets, launching a probe toward Rin herself with his own formula.
"Dash! (Bullet)"
A beat of stagnation, then a beat later, something like lightning surged out, leaving a perfectly straight scar in the air. The power of a charged magical bullet rivaled a sniper rifle round, but Flat knew Rin would block it.
A moment before he made his move, Rin waved five gems through the air with one finger as if swinging a bag. But the instant the bullet fired, the five gems were tossed out, hovering in mid-air to form a specific arrangement.
They were five gems: Blue, Red, Yellow, Emerald, and Pure White.
"[Five Stars of Rotation]"
"...Eh?"
The five gems shattered, and then a pulse of magical energy formed.
The magical bullet was indeed blocked, but Flat watched Rin's maneuver with a look of utter bewilderment.
'Why are you using an Ultimate to block a basic attack?'
"Just a heads-up, I don't want to fight for too long, so let's finish this quickly. I'll show my hand: the floating gem cluster helps with analysis and construction, and it has various automatic countermeasure functions. If you want to try and break them, you're more than welcome!"
Flat quickly understood the pointless reason why Rin "leaked" this potentially fake info. It was because the range of the [Five Stars of Rotation]'s magical flow covered everything—the gems in the sky and Rin on the ground—within its radius.
However, to Flat, this posture seemed like using a tactical nuke to swat a fly. An incomprehensible luxury that stood in stark contrast to the Rin he knew from long ago, who was frugal—or rather, stingy.
Flat subtly flicked his thumb to interfere with the ground; the earth near Rin suddenly surged upward.
Though Flat didn't have the "Earth" attribute, he could achieve similar effects using his unique Chaos Magic. This was one of his talents as a genius.
After completing the formula, he widened his eyes to observe every detail, only to see the ground within the influence of the [Five Stars of Rotation] get reversed by a counter-formula—presumably of the "Earth" attribute—the very moment it was about to leap up, returning to exactly as it was before.
"Now then."
Tohsaka Rin stopped resting her hand on her hip. She formed a finger-gun with one slender hand, but she didn't fire directly. Her other hand tossed a gem, which landed at the very tip of the finger-gun. On the emerald gem, the luster of magical energy swirled.
Flat, who hadn't even had time to prepare an interference for the [Five Stars of Rotation], ducked down, prioritizing his focus on dealing with the potential attack.
"It's my turn to move."
The gem hovering at the tip of her index finger rotated slowly, like a cylinder.
Rin smiled...
"Gandr."
A simple word. Yet, it was completely inconsistent with the actual scale of the sound.
Because what was released was not the Curse of Finn.
Instead, passing through that kaleidoscope-like gem, it underwent unlimited division and refraction from the start. Not only was each bolt no less powerful than a normal Gandr, but they were as dense as a volley of arrows—a Finn that surpassed Finn.
If it were just that, Flat wouldn't have felt panicked. But the truly fatal part was—these weren't simple curses.
It was lightning. It was fire. It was freezing. It was an ominous fluid. It was a blade of elemental magic.
That's right—everything released through the gem, triggered by a single "Gandr," were chaotic, small-scale elemental storms that shifted randomly.
The original minor Norse curse was nowhere to be found. The ultimate answer of one who commands the Five Great Elements freely—the Average One—was now suddenly thrust before Flat.
"Ah-re?"
Flat was momentarily dazed. Then, he let out an exaggerated scream and scrambled away, searching for a gap to dodge.
Behind him, a sea of Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void that made the atmosphere change color followed him in a unified, raging pursuit.
"Cheating! This way of using it is cheating!? A barrage of the Five Great Elements is way too out of line!"