Chapter Text
During Serenity’s training, she had been taught to scale sheer walls without making a sound and run at full speed over soft sand without leaving footprints. By the time she was twelve years old she could dodge arrows – by the time she was selected as the head of the Order she could do the same while standing on her hands. Her training demanded that she be one of the most agile and mobile people on the planet.
She’d gone on to use exactly none of it, because quite a lot of the rest of her training had drilled into her the idea that if she’d gotten to the point of scaling walls and evading the attacks of the guardsmen she would have already messed up unacceptably. Instead, she was taught to make use of her looks and charm and powers of persuasion to get close to her targets… or something they were about to eat or drink. Her tainted body had not come out of nowhere. Even before she began her hideous transformation, she was already an expert in the use and delivery of poisons, and had acted as a thousand nondescript serving girls feeding poisoned dates to generals or pouring clay flasks into palace wells.
As Hassan-i-Sabbah, she had not gotten into a single fight, or even really exerted herself outside of keeping her skill sharp. She hadn’t needed to.
Hassan of the Serenity indeed.
All of which was to say that Serenity was very much not used to dealing with what might be called ‘hard targets’.
She was somewhat regretting that now.
She leapt from her perch halfway up the side of the rocky pit an instant before spears slammed into it and crushed it to rubble. She ran along the shafts, surefooted as if she was sprinting down a street – and noticed the glow just in time. The spears lit themselves on fire just as she launched herself into empty space, and she felt the soles of her bare feet scorch.
The pit was already filled with so much flame that this hardly made a difference. Were Serenity not a Servant she would have found it almost impossible to see through the smoke, the heat haze, and the blinding glare of the fire pouring without fuel from every surface Avenger had control over. As it was, she was feeling the effects of her lowered Endurance. Had Kiritsugu been her Master still, she would have dodged by enough to not even feel the heat.
It wasn’t worth worrying about.
With another deafening roar, cannons fired, and suddenly the spears were so much shrapnel. Down below, Serenity noted that Avenger had blocked the shots aimed her way with a solid wall of spears, although Lancer was barrelling towards it palm-first.
When they impacted, Serenity felt the shockwave even in mid-air, and the flames billowed madly – but she had no time to be rattled. The air around her was filled with broken metal, most still red-hot from the fire. Turning a full circle in freefall, Serenity batted it aside with her knives, though they chipped and cracked from the impacts.
They would be no use. Serenity had no sentimentality whatsoever towards her killing tools, and threw them away immediately – which was to say, she fired them like thunderbolts straight at Avenger. Getting even scratched by one would bring death to almost anything alive under the sun, because the poison coating her persona weapons was about as potent as it got – getting hit by one would be worse, because the force behind her shots was about the same as a ballista bolt.
Avenger barely spared them a glance before pivoting out of the way. Fine. That wasn’t what Serenity had been after.
Lancer appeared in a rush of whirling hair in the path of the knives, and caught them neatly. With a crunch that could have been the knives finally snapping, they shoved them deep into Avenger’s chest and twisted, before planting a bone-shattering kick into her sternum that had Avenger skidding backwards before she recovered and lashed out with another blast of focused, white-hot flame from her flag.
The fire was immediately dispersed by a cloud of cannonballs that thudded into Avenger’s form, staggering her – and followed immediately after that by Lancer’s fist curving down to smash her further into the rock. They followed up with an earthshaking stomp – but Avenger was already reforming on the other side of the pit, an X of crossed stakes melting into each other and taking her form.
“Poison isn’t effective either, I see,” said Lancer. “I hadn’t really expected it to be, but it was worth a shot.”
Avenger glared hatefully at Lancer – more hatefully than normal – and Serenity was very glad she’d hidden herself against the side of the pit once more, clinging to a soot-covered ledge half a foot wide. “I’ve got the same body as you, ya dingus. Why would you even think it was worth trying?”
Lancer opened their mouth.
“Oh, wait, let me guess. ‘Funny’?”
Lancer closed their mouth.
“In a way I’m glad you’re the first person I’m killing. Well, second.” Avenger’s hate-filled eyes snapped onto Serenity’s hiding place. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you. Whatever toy you think you have that can work on me, let’s see if you can use it while impaled!”
Avenger slammed her flag on the ground, and once more spears lanced out from every available surface. Half of them were immediately intercepted by artillery shells or shredded by grapeshot, but some of Lancer’s weaponry had itself been knocked aside by emerging spears – and when Avenger cackled and set them on fire, some of the thicker stakes were able to shove past even Lancer’s counterfire.
This left a distressing number of sharp points heading towards Serenity, exploding out of the inferno below.
Still. She had not trained her entire life for nothing.
She jumped just as the first spear drilled into the rock where she’d been standing, and landed on the shaft – only to quickly swing herself under it and out of the way of the next. This time, she’d learned her lesson, and her feet had barely touched it before she moved, fast enough that she passed through the flame without feeling the heat. She dropped and landed on another, then cracked off a thin spike just above her and twirled it to bat away the next.
Further and further down she dropped, riding the spears as much as dodging them, swinging from shafts even as she dodged blades and ducked away from where the heat was greatest. Once more she formed her white knives – even if they could only last for a couple of blocks before breaking, that was a few extra seconds that she could survive, and a few feet closer to Avenger.
The pit looked like some crazed forest ablaze, or a flaming cobweb made by a bizarre military spider. Serenity mapped out the paths in her head, and navigated her way downwards, never more than an inch from death.
Avenger snarled down below – or maybe it was just a grunt of effort as she hammered down on Lancer’s guard with her sword. Either way, she’d kept enough capacity to ruin Serenity’s day, as every stake started growing tiny spikes along the shaft.
Serenity twisted in mid-air, aborting her landing on a particularly-vicious looking stake, and instead reached out to pinch the blade of a different spear between fingers and thumb. She was there for only a second before jackknifing her body out of the way of yet more emerging spears, then flung herself with only her fingers towards the next blade.
Before she was halfway there, she realised she’d miscalculated. Avenger’s smirk grew wider, and she slammed both her hands on the ground even while dodging a kick from Lancer. The heat spiked even beyond the insane ambient level – and a storm, a wall of blades surged towards Serenity from the ground. She knew she’d never be able to deflect them all, or even dodge, in mid-air as she was. Avenger had her dead to rights, and she knew it.
Fortunately, so did Lancer.
Yet another deafening roar saw most of the onrushing spears reduced to splinters as the Noble Phantasm guns fired once again. Serenity was now dropping towards a hail of viciously-sharp shards, but that wasn’t a problem.
The problem was the extra-thick, reinforced stakes plunging upwards towards her, pitted and scarred from Lancer’s assault but very much intact. Serenity couldn’t hope to succeed in breaking them where Lancer had failed, but if she had a knife that wouldn’t shatter instantly she could at least block long enough to push herself out of the way…
Then she caught a flicker of gold in the corner of her eye, almost indistinguishable against the red and orange that made up Serenity’s world down here in the pit, and almost laughed. It looked like Lancer had come to the same conclusion.
The stakes raced upwards, and Serenity spread her arms, as if to accept them…
… and the clay replicas of her own blades that Lancer had created slapped into her hands.
With blinding speed, Serenity slammed them into the side of the oncoming spike, and levered herself out of the way just in time.
Below her was just another spear left over from one of Avenger’s previous assaults, a horizontal bar blocking her path, and Serenity brought both her knives down on the shaft. They cleaved through like an axe through dead wood, and she plunged past without slowing down.
Once again, she closed in on Avenger, falling through ever-hotter layers of fire. Down below, Lancer pummelled Avenger with artillery blasts, wielded as precisely as a boxer’s punches – and in fact timed to be as awkward as possible to defend against at the same time as Lancer’s own close combat strikes. Anything to keep Avenger’s attention off Serenity for even a second longer.
Serenity touched down on rock heated so much it glowed like coal, and shot forward. Avenger’s back was turned, busy trading earthshaking blows with Lancer. Serenity primed and flung the Spiritron Dispersal Bomb, then jinked right and made as if to close in on Avenger.
Avenger turned and flung out an arm at Serenity, and the very air exploded into flames.
They were gone an instant later as the bomb went off.
To a human observer, nothing happened. To Serenity’s spiritual senses – the same thing that let her know when Servants were near – there was a horrific void of sucking nothingness, that instantly quenched Avenger’s flames, stilled the roiling earth below as it was ripped from both Lancer and Avenger’s control…
… and engulfed Avenger.
Avenger’s arm froze in place, nothing more than a clay statue.
The rest of her still moved.
Serenity had missed.
Maybe it was the shockwaves, maybe it was Serenity misjudging her strength now that Maiya was her Master. Either way, she’d failed. There was no point dwelling on the mistake, only learning from it and succeeding next time.
… but as Avenger examined her now-frozen arm with interest, then turned a calculating gaze on Serenity, Serenity found herself really, really wishing it had worked. As she watched, Avenger’s arm cracked all over, tiny pieces flaking off and getting caught in the updrafts of the incredible heat Avenger emitted. Beneath them was clean new flesh and steel – or clay imitating flesh and steel. Avenger turned her arm this way and that, examining it.
“Huh,” she said. “That completely blew out everything I had animating this body’s arm, at least until I pumped more power into it. I’m guessing I don’t want to be caught in that completely, right?” She sneered at Serenity. “Well, fighting this chucklehead,” she pointed a thumb over her shoulder at Lancer, “was already annoying enough without adding in attacks that might actually do something. So, uh, this has been real, but I think I’m just going to bail. Bye bye, have a horrible day.”
She bent her knees – and then the ground shattered as she rocketed skywards. A maelstrom of spears rose with her, layers eaten away every second by the relentless barrage of Lancer’s artillery but Avenger safe in the centre. Higher and higher she rose, past the top of the pit and past Lancer’s chains, already shown to be useless against her…
…until Lancer’s hand closed around her ankle. She swiped with her sword, but it broke on Lancer’s skin.
“God, you’re annoying,” she said. “Fine! If you want me in your stupid pit so bad, let’s go!”
With one hand, she reached out and grabbed part of the chains at the lip of the pit – she heaved her legs up and grabbed Lancer’s robes with the other. The chains stretched higher and higher under Avenger’s momentum, until with a mighty heave she hauled herself downwards.
Avenger and Lancer shot like bullets aimed by a vengeful god into the heart of the earth – almost directly on top of Serenity. She leapt aside frantically, just as Avenger slammed Lancer into solid rock with as much force as Serenity had seen anything hit anything else.
Rock lost. Rock fell.
Serenity awoke in darkness.
After the inferno that Avenger had made of the pit, the cool and dark of underground was like being plunged into icy water. Serenity swam – materialised still, she had to be to carry the all-important final bomb – through ground that even now shook from titanic forces unleashed deep below.
Eventually she emerged – into air, if not to light. Still, darkness was no obstacle for her. She crawled out from a fresh crack in stone slabs, covered in dirt. Her feet landed on stone, making no noise, and she took a deep but silent breath. Dust, cobwebs, old stuffy air… a cellar?
The ground shook once more, and a tiny piece of stone fell from the ceiling. It made no more noise than a whisper, just a tiny clatter in the dark, but even that was enough for Serenity to judge the size of the space by the echoes. Not a cellar, a catacomb. There had been such things under Kotomine church, hadn’t there?
The dead held no fear for Serenity… well, unless they’d been resurrected by the Grail. But even as weak a Servant as her was far beyond any ordinary ghost, so she strode the catacombs without fear.
Serenity paused to put an ear to the ground, and shivered. Far, far beneath her feet, there was a constant grinding and pounding of stone and metal – and, though she may have just been imagining it, a peal of hateful laughter.
She would have been quite content to leave Avenger locked in subterranean battle with Lancer for ever, two monsters holding each other at bay… had she not been almost certain that Kyushu would sink into the sea before a week was out.
Perhaps that was being unfair. Lancer at least knew the risk in leaving Avenger unchecked.
Serenity checked over the last Spiritron Dispersal Bomb. It was, miraculously, in good working order. And so was the other piece of insurance she’d taken along – the final, final resort, untested.
For now, she would try to find her way back to the pit. The fact that Avenger was trying to leave it suggested that she, at least, thought there was a good chance of her being trapped and caught there. Lancer’s job was to hold Avenger down – Serenity’s job was to deal the killing blow. They had a plan, and they’d stick to it.
She walked on in utter dark, her mental map refreshed every few seconds by pieces of the walls dislodged by Avenger and Lancer’s fight. She passed yawning voids where all sound vanished, picked her way across flagstones buckled and cracked from one or other of the epic impacts this poor hill had taken today, doubled back where the tunnels had collapsed entirely.
From the world of the dead, Serenity sought her return to the surface, just so she could willingly throw herself into hell once more.
Eventually, she saw it. Just a simple trickle of starlight, enough to count as ‘pitch black’ in any other time or for any other person. For Serenity underground, it was almost blinding. She made towards it…
… and the tunnel behind her exploded in a riot of flame and fury.
Serenity darted to one side, and barely avoided being gored by a spear of fire. Avenger stood in front of her, barely a hundred feet back down the tunnel. She blazed, lighting the catacombs in a hazy glow and making the statues cast bizarre flickering shadows on the stone walls.
So close.
“Right,” Avenger said, covered in wounds that knitted themselves together as Serenity watched. “Now that I’ve got a few spare seconds, hold still and fucking die, please.”
Serenity did no such thing.
As the tunnel was filled with more and more stakes, and the heat rose to unbearable levels, she ducked and wove and sprinted – towards Avenger.
A blade tore her upper arm. She ignored it – leaned into it, in fact, because it gave her an extra inch to avoid that spear thrusting in from the other side. Two blasts of fire rolled towards her, and she feinted left, then kicked off the opposite wall as they changed direction in mid-air to splash against the statue where she would have been. A stake pierced her foot, and she tore it free, ignoring the agony to just keep running.
Closer and closer she drew, and watched Avenger’s smirk.
She thinks she knows what I’ve got up my sleeve, thought Serenity.
Good.
Serenity raced towards Avenger, using every trick, every ounce of speed and agility to stay one step ahead of her final onslaught. It was the least subtle approach to an assassination she had ever done. Had she not had the practice against Archer in their chase, just those couple of days ago, she would never have made it, but somehow she worked her way closer to her target.
When she was only ten feet away, Avenger smirked, and slammed both hands on the stone floor.
A phalanx, a wall of spears burst from the ground, filling every inch of tunnel and blazing so hot Serenity could feel her hair curl. She charged forward nonetheless. She had faith.
In God, certainly. But most of all, right now, in her partner – and in their Masters, who knew how to communicate with each other for just such a moment.
Just before Serenity reached the wall, it was ripped apart by the unstoppable force that was Lancer – who emerged from the floor like a breaching shark and pulled the wall of spears aside as if it were no more than a set of curtains. Avenger’s face was revealed behind it, shocked.
The Spiritron Dispersal Bomb was already in mid-air.
Serenity watched in slow-motion as it sailed towards Avenger’s chest – five feet, four feet, three-
Avenger’s flag sliced it in two, then plunged into Serenity’s chest.
There was a numb sensation, then one of loss, and Serenity knew her spirit core was pierced. Already the strength was draining from her limbs, and her vision swam – while both were, for now, far beyond human limits, she had only seconds. In the gold light of Serenity’s dissolution, Avenger’s smirk grew – and Serenity smiled with her.
Because this was the moment. Let Avenger think that the bombs were her last resort, let her think that Serenity was somehow unwilling to die to see her mission through. Ridiculous. In every era, in every battle, the moment you thought you’d won was the very moment you were most vulnerable to having your world turned upside down.
Serenity’s hand was already drawing her last resort, heedless of the pain. In her hand, Emiya Kiritsugu’s Thompson Contender felt as natural as if she’d been using it all her life, an Origin Bullet already in the barrel.
She fired – and the bullet missed by an inch as Avenger frantically ducked.
An instant later, Avenger’s sword left flaming contrails in the air as it passed through the gun without slowing down. Springs and bolts flew, and the Mystic code fell, useless.
And just as Serenity had truly begun to despair, she caught a glint of gold once more.
She whipped her hand out to the side – and the clay replica of the Thompson that Lancer had just created fell into it. Serenity’s hands blurred, gold sparks flying as she fell apart, drawing a spare Origin Bullet and loading it into the Noble Phantasm Thompson.
Avenger’s sword slashed back in – only to be caught in golden chains.
Serenity fired her last chance directly into Avenger’s chest.
Avenger screamed as her body went haywire, spasms wracking it and spikes shooting off in all directions. Even fired from a Noble Phantasm, the bullet hadn’t penetrated deep enough – it was lodged about half an inch into Avenger’s iron-hard form, and though it was wreaking havoc on her clay body it hadn’t reached the core.
With the last of her strength, her body reduced to no more than the muscles absolutely necessary to get the job done, Serenity acted. She pulled out the knife Lancer had forged for her during this very fight, slammed it into Avenger’s chest, felt it connect with the Origin Bullet, and then felt both connect with some device deep within, coiled where the heart should be.
She felt the device crack.
She felt Avenger’s body go perfectly still.
And then she felt nothing at all.