Castle-Maniacs
Shirou looked restless.
While he had, through his short career as a wannabe hero of justice and a below average trainee magus, learned to overcome many of the personal faults that were common among both the magical and the non-magical populace, he had never trained his patience. Not like this. It was one thing to repeatedly do one thing for a long time to expect some manner of long term benefit like with physical training, and a whole different animal to do nothing for 24 hours straight. Under Bazett's gaze, he looked around like a bird, twitching his head every so often. With his enhanced vision, he was probably tracking the patrols that surely guarded the building they were observing, while hiding under a veneer of youthful bluster.
It had been a routine mission, they were escorting a team from the Clock Tower to finish ransacking the hideout of a Sealing Designate who'd been caught by the Enforcers of the Magic Association. The magi in the research team were no strangers to combat though, so their escort was a show of their status and influence, highlighting the fact that they had a high enough clout in the Clock Tower to hire their team.
Considering that the team had official members from the Clock Tower, the Sea of Estray and the Church in an experimental collaboration scheme intended to "hunt Dead Apostles and Philosopher Class Sealing Designates," their individual identities and the active membership status they had in both the team and their original organizations, it was natural for them to have garnered recognition simply by existing. Coupled with their success and their seemingly random raids on purely mundane criminal targets, they had inherited the most useful parts of the title of Magus Killer.
The routine mission hadn't remained one for long, though. Their trek into the wilderness of the northern United Kingdom in their search for the decentralized workshops of a Sealing Designate lead them through a small forest and into an area filled with hills, was dominated by a Castle resting between them in the distance. The architectural design of the castle was unmistakable, and the bounded fields and magics invested in it made it immediately recognizable to every Enforcer of the Magic Association and to every Executor from the Church.
A Demon Castle, one of the golems that were the trademark of the undead puppeteer Valery Fernand Vandelstam, the 14th of the Dead Apostle Ancestors.
As a high ranking Enforcer, Bazett had access to more information on the Ancestors than most, which included enough information on the Dark Lord of the Business World's effect on the performance of the castle shaped golem's bounded fields to know that the Apostle was inside the Castle they had found. With such a high priority target, the mission was aborted and half the team remained to monitor the situation and make sure that the vampire did not escape, while the other half left to notify the Association and, by extension Lorelei Barthomeloi.
Neither Shirou nor Bazett were dumb enough to reject the help of the Queen of the Clock Tower and her private army, but they couldn't count on Van Fem of the Demonic Castles to simply let them be, as close as they were to one of his golem castles. The tension was mounting, because Van Fem was a powerful magus from ancient times in addition to being a puppet user and a powerful Dead Apostle, so their discovery would bring an army on their head, in addition to the enmity of every guest in the Castle. They were simply not ready to deal with an army on top of one of the Apostle Ancestors.
Bazett was an experienced Enforcer, and she could remain standing still for over a day if she had to, but Shirou was just a kid with a dream and a set of skills that let him run around the world, chasing it. If they hadn't ended up in the same team, she was sure that the reckless boy would just chase after the first conflict he heard off until he died in the attempt to end it by himself or when one of the many enemies he'd inevitably make caught up to him.
One of the runes on her suit, one on her right shoulder, tingled. It was a silent alarm that alerted her when something that wasn't bolted or rooted to the ground moved after being activated. And Shirou, just like the members of the research team that had stayed behind had stayed behind, had not moved from their spot. Ergo, there was something in the clearing that had managed to escape detection from her other senses.
Now aware that there were intruders so close to her position that the rune in her suit had detected it, she understood Shirou's restlessness as the act it was and how it was aimed at getting everyone else to raise their guards. Preparing to counter-ambush their foes before they sprung their own ambush was simple common sense, and Bazett mentally nodded in approval.
The three magi that had remained with them, from the research team they had been escorted, had picked up that something was happening from Shirou's and Bazett's attitudes, and began to prepare themselves for combat. Bazett quietly studied the clearing in order to find the enemies in their midst.
Waiting a few seconds for their preparations to be complete and to be absolutely certain of the numbers and locations of the attackers in their midst, Bazett made her move. Jumping from her half kneeling rest position, Bazett punched one of the invisible targets, not bothering to stay watching as the rubble her hit had created turned it into regained visibility and fell to the ground in a heap.
Around her, blades of wind, fireballs and even what looked like a transmutation curse flew in the air, striking a handful of other targets within her sight. She saw no flying blades, and the noise of the small army of puppets that abandoned stealth in favor of directly attacking them combined with the spells being flung around to mute any information she could have gathered from the cacophony of battle that their previous hiding spot had become. A short hop forwards and a rising axe kick put one of the puppets in the path of the directed ranged attack fired in her direction by another puppet.
Rushing close to the ground, Bazett weaved through the falling pieces of the destroyed puppet, grabbing one from the air and throwing it at the second attacker in a single motion, before following its trajectory on the ground. The thrown rock wasn't a direct attack, it was a distraction that spun the targeted puppet and forced it to either focus most of its metaphorical processing power into stabilizing or to focus on retaliating against whatever attacked it before stabilizing again. The puppets of the fourteenth Dead Apostole Ancestor were not suicidal, and were capable of competent threat assessment, some basic pattern recognition and limited networking abilities.
They knew that their chance to succeed in their mission as individuals was small, so they attempted to act in limited concert to box her in, pin her down and destroy her in the crossfire. To this end, their maker had installed some cooperative formations and tactics, while their individual processing capabilities would allow them to adapt them to the situations they faced.
Of course, even with the advantages that a magus on the level of a Death Apostle Ancestor could put on his puppets, the reasoning of the puppets took time to reach an optimal solution. And the puppet that temporarily dismissed moving on its own power in favor of attacking found itself being grabbed from a blind spot and used as a giant club to bring down three other floating puppets and two golems that simply moved through the ground on two legs. For a human to dodge the lines of incinerated air, the directed boulders of compressed air and even the Mystic Eyes of the puppets was impossible to do unencumbered, never mind with a marble puppet bigger than an adult male.
But Bazett Fraga McRemitz was no ordinary human. Sacrificing the puppet in her hands when it broke in half, the enforcer made sure to destroy the core to prevent any kind of swift reconstruction from occurring. Looking around, she located two surviving puppets, the mostly unruffled members of the research team, Shirou and the remains of at least 20 puppets on the ground.
Shirou, dressed in flexible dark green body armor and covered in the Shroud of Martin, was somewhat reminiscent of the Archer of the fifth Holy Grail War. Thanks to the remains of the grail, she had managed to survive for far longer than the wound dealt to her by Kotomine Kirei suggested, while her mind was entertained with a loop in which she was trapped in a relentless repetition of the war. It was in this illusion that Bazett had seen the appearance of all the servants of the war with her own eyes, something that those who'd fought in the actual war had confirmed after comparing descriptions.
"This was just a scout force, I saw at least one other group of at least these numbers take a roundabout route to encircle us through the north," Shirou mentioned. If they tried to simply get away, they'd get flanked and pinned down for long enough for other groups to arrive, burying them in numbers if until they managed to kill them. If they stayed put, then the encirclement would be completed and they'd be drowned in numbers, maybe even bombarded from afar.
So, if they couldn't get away nor stand still, then they had to get closer to the castle and its inhabitants, or move sideways by staying at a roughly constant distance from the castle. For a puppet user with as much experience as Van Fem of the Demonic Castle, it would be child's play to notice the location of the destruction of a single puppet and lead his forces accordingly, so the patrols they had to avoid would probably focus on the site of the destruction of the puppets. It meant that, while the puppets were only being controlled indirectly, this location would be soon overrun by at least one other combat group and soon several others.
"We're spiraling around the castle, stay as little time as possible directly in front of the castle's entrance," Bazett said. After all, the entrance may be very well be the face of the golem. Despite being basically a gigantic puppet that would in general mean any shape and form of automatons capable of being controlled from without, the Seven Demonic Castles of Van Fem were actually golems. It meant that their shape had to have an upright torso, limbs for movement coming out from the lower torso, limbs for attack, defense or manipulation coming out of the upper torso and the reasoning core on top of the torso. This mostly human appearance was compounded by the way in which all the mimicries of sensory organs with any kind of precision or range also had to be on the head, as the price of a mystery that animated the puppet and kept it together.
Nobody spoke as they began moving. Everyone advanced with the same easy gate that voraciously ate ground while conserving their energy, despite their speed being higher than that of Olympic marathon athletes. They quickly left the clearing full of rubble, moving counterclockwise to avoid crossing through the front of the castle until they had circled most of the way around it. There was sparse underbrush filling the spaces between the trees of the forest in which they moved, but for the most part they moved in a soft arc that seemed more like a straight line, given the distances involved.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, they met nothing after circling the entire castle twice. They probably had accidentally mimicked the search pattern of the patrols, since they didn't meet anything for that long. But even at the speed they moved, keeping their distance from something the size of a castle while running through a forest in mostly uneven ground took time, and they managed to extend their survival for at least one hour. It was exhausting, mostly because despite the fact that sustaining their speed was simple, most of them were simply not used to that kind of extended physical exertion and they still had to conserve their strength for the combat they'd eventually face. Magic only went so far, especially for researchers who spent most of their time sitting and thinking instead of reinforcing their bodies.
It was only until their third cycle, after having lowered their moving speed considerably, that something happened. Only a quick block with a sword by Shirou managed to save the researchers from a barrage of curses, spells carrying enough power to carry the physical impact of bullets that were nonetheless broken on Shirou's blade. After that barrage was over, he danced around the researchers, cutting down curses that followed bent trajectories with the edges of his blades while they crouched and looked around warily. After a couple dozen destroyed curses, the small clearing they had stopped at turned into the home of an unnatural stillness in the night. It seemed like mammals, birds and insects alike had vacated the vicinity of the Demon Castle.
"What exactly were you cutting down, Magus Slayer?" asked one of the researchers. The title that Shirou received was actually a nickname that Caren Ortensia, aware of his adopted ancestry, had given him in jest during the initial meetings between the Magic Association and the Church that had lead to the formation of their group. The nickname, however, managed to spread far and wide, and it became the title through which the young Japanese magus was known in the Clock Tower and the twilit world.
"Brown curses. Shaped like Hagalaz," was Shirou's short reply. As their missions together mounted, Bazett noticed that he reflected the conversational patterns of his partner. With her, it meant that he would try to keep any chatter to a minimum, while the mission was not completed.
"One or two bars?" Asked another researcher. The hagalaz rune was closest to the Capital 'H' letter, and it's appearance was between an 'H' and an 'N', with the bent bar between vertical lines being interchangeably written with one or two parallel lines in normal mysteries. In more delicate rituals and spells, two bars usually meant demonic energies, a fact which she doubted that Shirou knew. She hadn't taught him that much, as far as runes were concerned, so it was up to his own independent study to find out, and such a distinction was somewhat advanced.
Making the flying curses invisible, or imperceptible to humans through purity of concepts was always a tricky proposition. Not impossible to achieve, but there would always be a segment of the human population who, through upbringing or study, simply saw through the veil. To achieve it using demonic power, an element nature that mankind could naturally detect because of the ease it had at harming them, was only another sign of the skill of Van Fem as a magus puppeteer and artifact maker.
"Two," Shirou answered. "What does it mean, then?"
"Demonic energies," the first researcher answered.
Shirou looked all around them into the shadows between the trees for a moment, before saying, "with Caren we would have avoided this." Bazett frowned at that. There was no need to give up information out loud in their situation.
Nothing moved after those words. The silent stillness was so heavy that it felt like not even their hearts were beating in their chests. The air felt as dense as mud, like it was planning to impede their every movement to watch them die suffocated in the forest. Even the energies of the greater source felt odd, sluggish and twisted. But the world didn't stand still for long.
The still air became oppressive. The ground shifted as if it was gathering strength, making her realize that it'd just became a possible tool for their enemy to locate or ambush them, while the trees began swaying with exaggerated noise, as if they were being moved by some silent internal mechanisms that put the wood under more stress than the wind would. Shirou began running diagonally, passing in front of each one of the three researchers before cutting even more flying hagalaz runes aimed at them.
The magi he had hidden from view for fractions of a second had not remained idle. Mixing a bladed spiral wind spell, a heating fireball and what probably was a remote transmutation that fed off heat to produce organic fuel and oxygen, an attack that dealt damage on an order of magnitude above even rocket powered grenade launchers was fired. Bazett stood a couple meters behind the loose triangle made by the magi casting their combination attack, warily looking around for any threats. The combined spell vanished in the shadows, leaving scorched trees and small fires lingering in its path.
The muted sound of an explosion reached their ears seconds later. The atmosphere remained oppressive.
The ground began to rhythmically vibrated under their feet, while the oppressive atmosphere of the clearing worsened with every step. It was enough to make anyone sane unnerved, but Bazett was a magus, which that meant that she was insane by the standards of normal people. Though even magi avoided unnecessary pain and death, even if it was only because they interfered with perfect experiments and sensory data accounts and wasted potentially reusable resources. The feeling spiked, and a form jumped off the ground several feet away.
It was a tank. A draconic shape, made of steel and filled with black fire that glowed with shadows that was reminiscent of an ankylosaurus and possessing a comparatively big head, one wider than it was long. The tail of the monster ended in a tail club that, before the eyes of everyone watching, elongated and forked in three to form thinner and more flexible endings. The torso was roughly cylindrical, with a maximum radius at the waist and thinning out to the head and tail, carried at a gallop by four thick legs.
The back of the torso was especially dangerous, being even more heavily armored than the original dinosaur and most likely heavily enchanted. At least two and a half meters tall, it was far taller and faster than anything had any right to be, made of metal and built for defense as it was, dressed in a layer of normal orange flames, ashes and glowing wooden embers on top of the black blazes it naturally emitted. It had obviously survived the first blast without taking any damage of note.
The research team magi all began to chant several different arias. By the buildup of magical energy and the harmonics emerging from their simultaneous arias, she could only guess that they were using a much more powerful attack. Considering that as far as the amount of magical energy went the metallic dinosaur automaton was almost a hundred time stronger than any of the puppets they had already faced and encountered, putting it down fast was a priority.
In that respect the jump it had taken was a boon, preventing it from dodging and momentarily giving it a predictable trajectory. But the leap of the heavy construct had been too small, and soon it would land on the ground, where it would have the leverage to change directions swiftly and use its build in addition to the curses it fired from its tail.
With sparks of darkness that ate light instead of producing it, the three spades that the single tail had produced began to aim independently and fire at the group, with Shirou returning to stand between them and the falling creature. In a single second, the beast would touch the ground, and it would use the full extent of its physical power in combat against the frozen magi. Except for the lithe form of Bazett, who dove to the ground and rolled forwards until her hands were firmly planted in the ground while making sure that the runes on her clothes retained their integrity, power and efficiency.
A fraction of a second before the beast ended its ballistic arc, the powerful body of the red headed enforcer that had been coiled into a small ball by her roll, extended to its full height, delivering a rising double kick to the beast with her full strength. The beast of metal weighted far more than a car, but her strike had delayed contact between the beast and the ground, sending the monster up in the air head first, flying over them and displaying its belly to the other members of their group while Bazett used part of the momentum she gained from the kick to hop to her feet and jump forwards, away from the puppet tank.
The other combatants didn't disappoint. The combined spell of the researchers produced a fire too bright for any of the present to distinguish any shape, but the impact and subsequent explosion was enough to send them flying, despite the defensive mysteries they produced to defend themselves from the effects of their magecraft. Shirou was different. He had called his signature black bow, nocked a sword instead of an arrow and let it fly. Bazett's grounded position and defensive posture had protected her eyesight form the glare of the explosion, so she managed to trace a hurried defensive rune scheme on the ground to protect her.
It turned out to be unnecessary. She had recognized the blade Shirou fired as a Noble Phantasm that caused intense cold, and the heated metallic body of the puppet had reacted as intended to such a sudden and swift decrease in temperature, exploding in a shower of shards that exploded perpendicularly to the impact of the blade. Thus ensuring that no shards had impacted her or any other member of the team.
With a ground shattering impact that resonated in her legs, the remains of the metallic dragon ankylosaurus finally touched the ground behind the researchers. Incredibly, it was repairing itself before their eyes, swiftly undoing the damage dealt to it so far, until a blade flew through one of the openings in the thick metallic carapace of the puppet and buried itself deeply into its body. The repairs stopped immediately, the dark fire that burnt within the puppet was quenched in an instant and the effects of the powerful demonic energies in the countryside vanished.
Narrowing her eyes, Bazett fearlessly walked up to the downed mountain of metal and stuck her hand in the opening through which the blade had flown. Tracing a fractal material rearranging rune set with her finger, she added a spark of magic that disabled the remaining traps inside the puppet before ripping the blade out of the puppet. The frown on her face narrowed imperceptibly when her suspicions were confirmed. The blade thrown was a Black Key, a mystery that was supposed to belong only to the Church.
Caren had developed a habit of gifting some of the best Black Keys she made to Shirou, as she tried to convert him to Catholicism. The Japanese man had continuously rejected her, with claims that boiled down to 'it would be hypocritical to join only to keep sinning as I already do.' The fact that the Black Keys Caren gave him got heavily used as a cheap alternative to projecting a Noble Phantasm with proportionally smaller yet effectively similar effects was a fact that the white haired woman liked to flaunt to the enforcer.
Once it was in her hand, the Black Key's blade disappeared and left only the grip and the guard in her hand while she walked over to Shirou.
"Here," she said as she silently offered him the weapon back. As Shirou grabbed it, she added, "good job," to which he responded by nodding at her.
"What made that doll jump? I saw the first sword, but-" Asked the youngest of the researchers, a plain blonde woman with chocolate eyes but several years older than both Shirou and Bazett. She specialized in low scale atmospheric manipulation and she used wind to fight in battles. She had the most and best magic circuits out of the research team she belonged to, and the crest of her family, making her one of the most dangerous members of the research team to meet in the battlefield.
She was also socially incompetent, for the most part, being too blunt and too sensitive about her weak points to politically advance her family's position. As far as Bazett knew, her parents were arranging an spouse for her. Bazett just stared at her for a second before watching around the clearing in search for threats. Shirou, ever helpful, answered the question.
"It was a holy sword that incites panic on the cursed and demonic. For a puppet animated by a minor demon like that, stabbing it into the ground was enough to make it instinctively jump in the air."
"That kind of power did not belong to a minor demon," protested the same researcher as the others watched in silence.
"The demon was there to maintain the affinity of the stored prana," Shirou replied. "The actual magical power probably came from a leyline, the greater source or even the Apostle Ancestor itself. That or it had some sort of energy repository inside."
As dangerous as the running demonic metal dinosaur was, it was simple enough to create repeatedly. It was a real threat in combat, but hardly an insurmountable one. As shown when it had been destroyed before its full power had been brought to bear.
"The flash and shock-wave from that explosion were too obvious. We won't avoid the patrols for much longer," Bazett informed the rest.
"We should head straight for the Demonic Castle, then. Spread as the patrols are we are just setting ourselves to a battle of attrition against an enemy that receives fresh reinforcements in waves, if we hold our ground anywhere," Shirou said. "Moving for the castle should draw the patrols to a smaller area, and from there I should be able to target a big enough number to clear a way out. With their numbers thinned out or at least pinned down, we should be able to fight our way out and outrun our pursuit."
'If Van Fem doesn't decide to chase us, of course,' Bazett thought. It was a plan with good points. The trees didn't do much to impede the puppets from leveraging their number's advantage, while the forest ended for a wide circle centered in the Demonic Castle. In the open, they'd be able to use their ranged abilities with greater ease. But the only way that Shirou could clear out a large number of puppets was through the most obvious applications of his Reality Marble, such as the proverbial rain of Noble Phantasms that would deal immense amount of damage to everything caught in the targeted area or a full deployment that overwrites local reality.
Of course, such displays would attract the attention of any decent practitioner of thaumaturgy while giving them ample samples of his power. And attracting the attention of a Dead Apostle Ancestor on their own territory was almost guaranteed a bleak time in the future. While Van Fem was, like Altrouge Brunestrud and several others, one of the Ancestors who did not posses one of their own, he was still a magus, and a living human with a Reality Marble was an interesting specimen. A human who developed one was sure to attract his attention to be either destroyed outright or captured and experimented on as soon as possible.
The viability of Shirou's idea, then, rested on the amount of time that Shirou could avoid being defeated and the time when the Clock Tower task force would arrive. He didn't mention it, but it was obvious that if something went wrong he planned to stay and delay their enemies while the rest escaped. Even now, he still found it impossible to place the value of his own life above that of others. The idiot would still sacrifice himself so that everyone else would leave and thus, live.
"Fair enough," Bazett said. "Let's move on."
If Shirou tried something as dumb as staying behind, then she'd just stay by his side and refuse to leave him. But if he thought that they would blindly follow his plan because of her apparent consent, then he would pace himself better, for when the battle would come and he would need all the energy he could spare. A leader had to know how to get their followers to follow her orders, after all, and Shirou had proved to bring with him his own faults and strengths.
The short pause to discuss their situation was enough for everyone present to collect themselves after the battle, so they resumed the pace they were moving at before the short bout of combat without a complaint. Now that they were moving in a straight line towards the castle, their minds compartmentalized, preparing themselves for the combat to come. They were simultaneously examining their surroundings for enemies and analyzing the combat with their previous opponents to prepare for the ones they'd meet in combat soon.
The trek itself was uneventful, the rolling hills covered by bushes and trees steadily giving way to level ground covered by trimmed grass, the occasional decorative tree and patches of colorful flowers in a tasteful, if sparse, garden that reminded every visitor that the fourteenth was the Apostle that preferred a human life to that of a vampire. They were finally attacked as they were coming close to the outer edge of the Castle's wards and thus the limit they could not cross, since they weren't about to storm inside and demand an audience with Van Fem.
The next attack, unlike the previous, did not come in the form of an ambush, but in that of powerful ranged attacks that would damage an area of effect instead of a single, human sized target. The silver glint of black keys under the moonlight was the only indication that anything attempted to intercept them, but once the projectiles and spells vanished in mid air explosions, it became clear that none of them had reached their destination. The resulting clouds of dust, acids, dust, smoke and debris simply dispersed according to the laws of the world, while the explosions seemed to signal every puppet in their surroundings to combat awareness.
Time lost a meaning, right there and then. Bazett stopped even verbalizing her thoughts and simply focused on combating the legions of puppets, golems and automatons that came out from everywhere intent on their destruction. Most of the trees and many of the flowerbeds were revealed disguised or inert puppets, before the combat began in its earnest.
Over sixty destroyed enemies later, their group had arranged themselves in a loose triangle, with the magi of the research team in one point while Shirou and Bazett fought at the two other points. It was only some three hundred destroyed enemies later that she noticed human shaped shadows framed by the light coming from whatever illuminated the room they were in. The guests of the castle had already noticed them, and considered them to be beneath their notice as enemies, merely some fortuitous entertainment at best, for some. She had to warn Shirou, who was the one who'd attract their attention and wrath the most if he called on the stronger weapons in his arsenal.
Slowly making her way to Shirou wasn't likely to work, especially since the loose triangle in which they'd arranged themselves in allowed for the interior of it to become a killing field that the limited reasoning of the puppets learned to avoid. Not to mention that if she got too close, then splitting back up would be a tough proposition that would leave them surrounded on all sides again. She wouldn't waste her energy and Shirou's for something so frivolous.
Instead, she ripped an enormous crystalline eye from a puppet and threw it at a puppet that Shirou had just used as cover for one of the ranged attacks of the puppets. When she saw him clear out his immediate surroundings with his two weapons, the married blades Kansho and Bakuya, she understood that he'd gotten her message. She watched as Shirou crossed the blades over his back, allowing their attractive properties to keep them sticking to one another and to the metal clasp that held the two sleeves of his red coat together. They were real after all, and unlike the majority of his arsenal of Noble Phantasms, not copies brought to this world by his specialized Gradation Air.
The burst of attacks had given him a short respite, and three more enemies fell before something else happened. A red spear appeared in his hands, and his posture changed. The methodical, if occasionally rash fighter was gone, replaced by a more visceral one. The human strength and stance that had felled the enemies fallen before him were gone, and the inhuman strength of a hero of ancient times who could, and had, ascended to the throne of heroes was reborn in the outer edge of the wards of the Demon Castle.
Bazett watched as he smacked a diving puppet up in the air, where it slowed down to a standstill by the powerful bounded field that protected the castle. The puppet was already readying weapons to attack the red headed intruder, but Shirou had long jumped and landed on top of it, tracing glowing runes in midair with the tip of the red spear at a level of skill that went well beyond what anyone alive should have. It was still too far away to see clearly, but she was sure that she had deduced the identity of the weapon in his hands. Gae Bolg, the spear of Cu Chulain, hero of Ireland.
Experimentation had taught them that while Shirou could activate the Noble Phantasms he projected, and even have the weapons fight as if they were still being wielded by whoever hero made them Noble Phantasms, he couldn't really access the skills of the heroes. Therefore, the only sane solution for what was happening other than Shirou suddenly learning how to use runes on the same level as the student of the witch Scatach Cu ChulaÃn, was that he was allowing the Noble Phantasm to move him as if it was still being wielded by the Irish hero and Lancer of the 5th Holy Grail War. A hero who was preparing an attack on the fly using the runes he had learned in life for some sort of technique, and dragging Shirou's body along for the ride.
Bazett's heart sped up nonetheless, wasting some energy on the next enemy she destroyed by using too much power. Shirou, or rather Gae Bolg, finished carving a rune circle in the wards that surrounded the castle. He was using the hovering puppet as a platform kept still by a black key in its shadow, and he began arching back as if to throw the spear. Magical energy began to fill the cursed spear, filling it with power to the brim of its capacity and more. The lance became a glowing arrow of light held in Shirou's hand, who bent back as if he was drawing a bow before throwing it and accompanying the move with a loud declaration of the lance's name.
"Gae Bolg!"
The throw had most likely damaged the muscles involved in it by forcing them to perform beyond their safe limits, but the attack was completed successfully. It pierced through the wards as if they weren't there, and instead of simply breaking them and allowing their energy to disperse into the night, the magical power previously contained in the bounded fields spiraled into the flying Noble Phantasm, taking the shape of an ethereal screw of unstable magical energy that drilled through every obstacle within the path of the flying Gae Bolg.
The actual flight of the spear was too fast for any of the humans present to track, but they had predicted where it was flying to, and had been already looking at the target. The lance that could distort time-space as it flew true at its target finally exploded deep inside, after having pierced through several inner walls of the castle. A visible if translucent wave of distortion traveled in all directions from the point of impact, rapidly overcoming the expanding ball of incandescent gases that was at the impact point, dislodging masonry, shattering windows, destroying artwork and collapsing bounded fields. When it reached the outer edge of the castle, however, it began to bounce around the surface instead of leaving the castle's structure.
The wave of compressed air that escaped through the entryway created by the attack hit the combatants in the castle's surroundings with the force of an angry giant. But even the small delay between the explosion and the impact of the atmospheric shock wave was enough for someone with Bazett's skill to react. When the wave passed her position, she was inside a hole in the ground created by her punching it in a hurry.
The explosion reverberated through the ground and the air, the shock wave advancing unopposed through the other combatants in the skirts of the castle, while a fortunate few managed to weather, avoid, defend or even outright ignore the impact of the pressure wave. The rest of the combatants weren't as fortunate, with most of them being flung around in the air like confetti in a blender. From her position in the ground tucked inside a small crater, all Bazett managed to hear was the explosion before everything felt silent. With her ears ruptured by the pressure wave, and her body bruised from dodging the shock wave and from the turbulence that managed to sneak into her improvised trench, Bazett used magecraft to siphon the free magical energy in the air to apply some basic medical mysteries on her injuries.
