The moon.
It's a rare treat that I get to see the moon. Hm, perhaps let me rephrase that: it's rare that I get to stand around and gaze at the moon on a given day. I know that some people out there in the world, wherever they are, are fond of doing this, and I would love to join them as one of their kind - but I guess unfortunately for me, I can only enjoy its presence for a few seconds at a time while I'm on contract or while training in the dead of the night at Meridian Park.
I glance all around me, making sure to do a full sweep to get a sense for my surroundings. It seems like I'm in the middle of a forest; tall trees are towering into the sky all around me, though I don't know what type of trees they are, as my arboreal knowledge is rather lacking at the moment. Sequoia? Maybe redwood, like in the redwood forests that are famous here in my home state of California?
Then something hits me - it's dark. Or, at least, the sky appears to be dark. But the trees, the ground - this environment is brightly lit up as though it is sunny, and it's not as if there's a giant floodlight arbitrarily just hanging over my head for no good reason, either. So I look up.
A nightmarishly bloated moon hangs in the sky, ballooned to a size cosmically dangerous for the planet that would render one definition of the word "tide" nonexistent if that's how the moon were in reality. Pock-marked and freckled with black craters everywhere, with the craters occupying a range of sizes too large for human vocabulary, the almost blinding moon glares back down at me from its low-hanging perch in the sky.
The funny thing about the moon is that it's not as beautiful as some say it is; in fact, you can put me under the "weirdos" category when it comes to my rationale behind why I think the moon isn't hot shit. For one, moonlight is not bright, at least not in my experience: there have been nights where full moons have shined down on Meridian Park during several of my midnight training sessions, only for the park to still be drowned in pitch black darkness like any other day since the park has no lampposts or streetlights of any kind anywhere on its premises. It also doesn't help that the moon itself never grows any bigger in size than a penny in the sky, so any size the moon assumes bigger than that is a dead giveaway to me that something is very off, which is a large reason why I find this current moon blazing silently down at me to be so repulsive.
That's what I don't like about the moon. Sometimes it's there in the sky, sometimes it's not. Some nights it'll only be a shadow of itself, and other days it'll assume its full power. Sometimes it'll be in one part of the sky; some nights it'll be on the opposite end of the sky. And perhaps its worst offense is the fact that on the nights when it can be seen, as I've mentioned above, the moonlight hardly does anything to light your path in the middle of the night when it's the only source of light that might be available. False hope is what it's providing...a maddening sense of hope that one might cling to under the perverse self-afflicted promise that everything will be alright, that everything will turn out okay, a promise only possible because it's impossible to see anything going on around you.
So by that point, you might as well not even have the moon in sight. Obviously it still needs to be there, I'm not saying we should just blow it up with our entire global nuclear arsenal. But let's just say that I don't need to go through my nights knowing that the moon is loitering somewhere in the cosmos above me, nor will I go out of my way to find where it is just to look at it.
But despite all this, despite all the trash talk that I've employed against the moon, it's still nice to look at every once in a while. Just not all the time. What few friends I still have from my school days have told me that it's better going moon-gazing with friends and some alcoholic beverages of your choice, but I haven't tried that yet, and I'm not sure when I will. Besides, half the shit I hear out of their mouths are when they're drunk as fuck.
That being said, I wouldn't recommend this view to anyone who has even a mild form of trypophobia, because my God, it's reminding me why I'm not very fond of the moon in the first place.
On top of the strange brightness of the moon, I notice the eerie lack of breeze or ambient sound in this forest. It's not that it's impossible for a forest to be this quiet and lifeless, but there's obviously something off about it, as if the swollen moon screaming its luminescence at me weren't a big enough sign of it.
It's as if this place, whatever it is, is reading my mind, for as soon as I start seriously pondering the strangeness of this place, of this forest, I hear sharp cracking, snapping, and rumbling of moving earth somewhere behind me. Whipping around to assess this possible threat, I spy a strange black sword poking its way up out of the earth. At first glance it resembles Jalter's black swords that she can summon, but a better look at it would suggest that this is a different kind of sword, because the last time I checked, Jalter's black swords don't glow red in the dark like this one.
Turns out, this was just a bait, and I fell for it. I see the vicious glowing tip of a black sword exactly like the one I see digging itself out of the ground slide through my chest cavity first before I feel the pain that comes with it. The pain is much more amplified than what I remember; I can immediately tell that whatever the hell is going on in this forest, it's also somehow amplifying the pain I feel from getting hit with this stray blade.
But while I can perhaps handle the pain mentally, physically my body is in shock. I make an attempt to move, since I get the sense that more swords will strike me at any moment, but my body is sluggish and won't listen to my nervous system, even though my spine is still intact. And sure enough, there are more swords where the first came from, and three more pierce my body through my gut, abdomen, and chest from both the front and back.
I can deal with one sword sticking out of my chest like a laundry pole, but four at a time is a bit much, even for me. And to make matters worse, as I'm forced to take a knee due to the overwhelming pain that's numbing my mind, I look up with strained eyesight to realize that the first blade that I laid my eyes on has now pried itself free of the dirt out of which it was digging and poises itself to strike at me, too.
"Ah, shit."
I can barely get the words off my tongue before the fifth sword zips straight for me, tearing perfectly straight through the center of my ribcage. Perhaps what's more surprising is that after it makes impact and juts out through the back of my chest, I find myself getting lifted up off the ground, then hurled straight backwards until I slam back-first against the side of one of the large trees in this forest. The back of my head crashing against the side of the tree with such force is almost enough to knock me out, and it certainly disorients me sharply with blurred vision and dampened hearing, but I'm not quite out of it yet...though how much "yet" entails is a mystery to me.
As I hang nailed to this tree with five swords still lodged in my body, even worse so now that I've been RKO'd against this sequoia - redwood? - I struggle to handle the pain that cripples my limbs and my breathing. When was the last time I've felt this much pain, to the point where my breathing is choking and my eyes are starting to roll up in their sockets? Perhaps too long - the sensation of this situation is familiar, both vaguely and intimately at the same time, if that's somehow possible. It reminds me of being sick - while obviously you should try not to be sick if you can help it, people who are usually never sick have a hard time dealing with illnesses on the rare occasions that they are sick. At least in my experience. Maybe that ought to be my catch phrase...
Only problem is, this pain is too painful. And not to mention, the fifth blade should have easily pierced my spine with how it impaled me, so why is it that I can still feel my legs and toes, much less move them around a little?
No, this pain - this pain is fake. Or more rather, this pain is not actually pain...it's madness.
Clenching my teeth and closing my eyes this time, knowing full well that doing this has a chance to cause my mind to turn off its consciousness, as is its natural course of action in this situation, I mentally shove this current "pain" that I'm feeling to the corner of my brain in order to recall real pain, actual pain. On anyone else, on any other Master or human being, this trick, this gimmick of subjecting the victim to an illusion of madness veiled thinly by overwhelmingly unbearable pain would have worked.
I, on the other hand, have felt my fair share of physical pain. And I'm afraid taking five swords through the chest still isn't quite enough to make me reconsider my personal definition of it.
The trees around me suddenly and spontaneously catch fire. There's no reason why they should, but fire douses them from the top down, savagely immolating their leaves first, then the branches, then the trunk, all the way down to the roots in the ground itself. The more I concentrate on my memories of pain, the more violent the flames that are destroying the forest become, and the faster and stronger they spread. It's not long before the very familiar sounds of crackling, burning leaves, wood, and grass fills my ears like cacophonous music, and the suffocating nostalgia of fresh wildfire smoke fills my lungs.
But I know I'm not done. Keeping my eyes shut and heaving my lungs out through my nostrils while retaining my clenched teeth, I keep drawing on my personal experiences with physical pain to continue drowning out the fake, amplified pain that I've managed to shove aside. I keep at this for five minutes...ten minutes...thirty minutes...an hour...two hours...at some point I lose track of the hours, but I only stop once I hear a muffled but titanic explosion in the sky.
Looking up beyond the smoky air from all the burning trees and forest ground, I can see even with my extremely blurry vision the bloated moon above being incinerated where it hangs in the night sky. Quickly grabbing the hilts of the black swords still stuck in my chest cavity, I tear them out and toss them aside, making sure that I can still stand like I suspected, which I can, to watch the moon in all its trypophobic glory burn to a crisp right in the middle of the sky until there is nothing left.
Just before Caligula's fist can knock my head off from its neck, I react to his thunderous approach just in the nick of time by snapping up my left hand.
PING!
A high-pitched, metallic click resonates from the impact zone between our fists, stopping Caligula's fist harmlessly against the side of my left hand where I've raised it to block his strike about an inch and a half from my left cheekbone. Wisps of magenta aura evaporate quickly into the air around me. Any later than this, and I would be, at the very least, knocked out cold with a severe concussion or ended up with permanent brain damage depending on where on my face Caligula's fist would have struck.
Caligula freezes the exact moment his fist connects with my parry. I don't give him time to react, because my assumption is that his Noble Phantasm has most likely also affected my own Servants and therefore taken them out of commission for now, so the safe course of action here is to fight as though I am alone, and that's what I do.
Shrieking with confusion mixed with surprise and pain, the Roman Berserker Servant finds himself launched away from me about ten meters, regaining his balance swiftly after I've punched him in the face to return the favor with my right fist.
"M-Master - !?" I hear Tamamo weakly crying out somewhere behind me.
I'm in no position to check on her or Kiyohime's conditions however, for Caligula redoubles his efforts coming after me. But now that I've broken out of the grip of his Noble Phantasm gimmick, and now that Caligula himself probably knows that his Noble Phantasm somehow has not found success in disorienting me as intended, all that's left for me to do is subdue him.
In true Berserker fashion, Caligula throws himself back at me, leaping a bit to smash my head in with a double-handed hammerswing blow, reaching his fists over his head for maximum power. But his attack is telegraphed as Berserkers often are in their behavior and attack patterns; that won't work against a defensive technique that nullifies incoming damage from an attack so long as the attack is seen through or correctly anticipated.
PING!
Another parry rings out as I meet his hammerhead strike with the back of my left hand this time, and again I riposte with my right fist, this time pummeling Caligula with a flame-powered gut punch. But I control the strength of my punch; rather than send my opponent flying into the air like I could, I make it so that his body hangs in the air for a brief moment as a reaction to my hit as the flames from my knuckles tear through his uniform and skin underneath. And as he catches some hang time, I reach up with hands, seize his head, and drive his face straight down into the wooden planks of the ship.
Seemingly unimpressed, Caligula simply tears his face out of the deck floor and flails his arms out in an attempt to grab my shins, but I plant the top of my right shoe against his face as he looks up from the wooden floor, kicking him hard enough to send him catapulting backwards and forcing him to land flat on his back.
Instead of waiting for him to come at me again, I launch myself into the offensive: as Caligula tries to get back up to his feet, he looks up only to find me suddenly dropping down on him from above, complete with a burning right fist aimed straight at him. Sensing the imminent danger, he tries to protect himself by shielding his face with his arms, maybe also to catch the fist that I'm about to punch him with, but a Berserker with limited motor functions like him doesn't have a shot in hell of predicting where I'll be landing my punch, which connects with his stomach.
A boat-shaking explosion rocks the ship, and Caligula and I are immediately engulfed by the resulting flames and smoke that my flame-powered punch generates this time. I can briefly hear Kiyohime's and Tamamo's muffled shrieks in the background, but I can't dwell on them because Caligula is right back on my ass again after crashing down to the below-decks of the flooded ship.
PING! PING! PING!
The enemy Berserker has by this point fully realized how much of a threat I really am, as indicated by his hastened pace of attacks and increasingly urgent grunts, growls, and roars. My parries are aggravating him especially, because to him it must seem like a puny kid, an ordinary human like me is almost effortlessly invalidating any attack he throws at me, never mind his Noble Phantasm. Unfortunately for him, his heightening sense of urgency and failure cause his attacks to become almost boringly predictable, though I can tell that his attacks themselves have become increasingly stronger and stronger, possibly due to a Servant Skill of his.
PING!
After parrying a particularly brutal swing from his left fist that would have broken all the ribs over my right lung and then smashed my lung to a pulp in a single blow, I retaliate again by jamming my left elbow into Caligula's chest to see if that'll knock the wind out of him. I put enough strength behind the elbow strike that'll make just about anything double over, even Servants, but it seems Caligula doesn't budge much - he's done something to let him take more hits, probably a defense skill of some kind.
The elbow strike was a very risky maneuver, and now that my opponent didn't budge from it, Caligula can easily punish me for my overextension; to compensate for my mistake, I silently activate Time Distortion, which slows both of us down just long enough so that I can sidestep out of the way and out of Caligula's reach so by the time I disable it, Caligula seems visibly confused as to how I was able to react so fast to his grab.
I leave much to his imagination on that regard and instead snap my fingers almost right in front of his own face, detonating a small but concentrated explosion of mana there. His surprised state causes him to stumble backwards in reaction to my small attack, which opens him up to two more fiery mana explosions that I follow up with before diving back at him, grabbing him and flinging him up out of the flooded decks where we've been fighting for a few moments.
Tamamo and Kiyohime let out surprised shouts, once when they see Caligula's body get chucked out of the fiery, smoking below-decks and twice when they see me appear right over him at the apex of his thrown trajectory, with a solid rune providing mid-air stabilization for my feet. I mix it up with my own attacks this time, opting for a firm palm strike directed at Caligula's face to send him flying straight back down at the ship, but I limit my power so as to avoid dunking him straight down to below-decks for a second time, and the Roman Berserker crashes haphazardly back down to the top deck, not far from the recovering Tamamo and Kiyohime.
"Master!? Are you - " Kiyohime tries to call out, a bit shocked herself to see me take on a rampaging Berserker alone like this, which I suppose is understandable since Kiyo, who is herself a Berserker, might understand how risky it must be to try to fight an enemy one all alone, which is exactly what I'm doing. But since I prefer to let my actions do the talking for me, I concentrate on my opponent to finish the job.
Before Caligula can get back up on his feet again, I crunch my right heel straight down into his gut, pinning him where he lays. This time a twenty-meter drop and a heel drop achieves what my much weaker elbow strike couldn't, and while Caligula is momentarily stunned trying to regain his breath, I put both feet on either side and start smashing my knuckles into his face. I muster a dangerous portion of my focus on enhancing the power of my punches, and while I don't intentionally draw my flames to them, my punches soon begin smoldering and flaming on their own the more I dish out.
Caligula desperately tries to defend himself, both raising his arms to try to block my unrelenting punches and to grab them in an effort to fight back, but every time his resistance gets annoying, I simply jam my heel again into his gut to make him double over, and I knock him back down to the ground with a punch to the face and keep going from there. I don't care if he's applied some sort of performance-enhancing skill to himself, I keep punching him in the face until he's out.
And eventually, I achieve exactly that, after about ten minutes of continuous pummeling. Having taken God knows how many direct punches, Caligula's face is splattered with blood, so much so that you'd have a hard time believing that simple, multiple consecutive punches did all that. Caligula's arms and gut aren't much better, both blackened, bloodied, and bruised from all the abuse I've given them to KO Caligula.
Breathing deeply and exhaustively, I glare down at Caligula, making absolute certain that he ain't about to get his ass back up to try to come after us. Sweat is pouring down my brow and scalp, dripping off my chin, and some sweat drops splash against and mix with the blood that I've smeared all across the knuckles and backs of my black fingerless gloves. Despite the magical reinforcing I've given the fingerless gloves, I can still feel the telltale ooze underneath them, signifying that I've broken open the skin on my knuckles again.
After I've ascertained that Caligula is down for the count - for now, at least - I glance to my right, where Tamamo and Kiyohime are silently looking on. I notice that they both have uncertain, perhaps even blank looks on their faces. But I choose to ignore their reactions.
"Are you two okay? Did his Noble Phantasm do anything to you two in particular?" I ask them quickly. My voice comes out haggard and strained, as should be appropriate.
They both immediately shake their heads. "W-We were simply weakened and disoriented for a few moments, but it is no matter now," Kiyohime quickly explains, looking away for a moment. "For...for you to have to have fought an enemy Servant alone like this...I sincerely apologize for my neglige - "
"It's fine. As long as you two're fine," I offhandedly remark, glancing down at Caligula again.
Striding over to my side with a look of resolution, Tamamo reaches for my hands, causing me to wince a little.
"Please give me a moment, Master, I will heal your wounds..." she murmurs in a serious tone after planting a few talismans on Caligula's body, either to immobilize him or to keep him at bay to dissuade him from trying anything funny. I say nothing as she patches up my torn knuckles with her magic. "So will you really try to get Caligula to join us?"
"Yeah. I just need to give him an offer he can't refuse..."