When night came early to the Summoner's Castle at Chalice, there were thirteen within: five children, four Servants, 3 helpers from the village and Tora, keeping watch on the walls as the others had their dinner. Diarmuid had pointed out there wasn't much point to fortifications if they weren't manned, especially in a world where people had flying mounts and other strange magics.

As it turned out, he was right about that, although a lot more right about the strange magic than the usefulness of manning the fortifications.

The early night that fell over the Summoner's Castle was the night of sunlight fading away, of thoughts sliding off emptiness, and above all of not noticing. And Tora wouldn't have noticed at all, except for her little night lizard familiars, which knew true night from illusion, and how the wind changed when the sun set. It didn't change here. They chittered wordlessly in her mind as they swarmed over her, waking her from a confused daydream she was too happy to forget.

She didn't shout a warning. Instinct told her it wouldn't matter. Instead she sent the night lizards scurrying away from her as she concentrated hard on the empty spots in her vision. The fortress's entrance… where was it? She knew where it should be but when she looked directly at that wall, all she saw was…

What was she looking for again? Her mind, with no input to latch onto, slipped away once again into daydreams.

.

.

Artoria Alter flattened herself against the top of the wall. She could sense no more than her host, but her innate magic resistance made her much better able to think about what she couldn't see. Something was invading. She could see flurries of dust and flickering shadows, but nothing else. Rolling back to her knees, she put her back against the rampart. Brute force would be ideal here, but she wasn't sure if or when she'd be able to use Morgan Excalibur again. For the moment she would keep her Master safe, and wait for an opportunity to do something useful.

The night lizards skittered across the courtyard garden, pouring into the Great Hall through the cracked door. While the volunteers from the village had preferred to eat in the kitchen, everybody else ate at the table in the Great Hall.

At a glance it looked like a school meal, with seven children, Diarmuid as the headmaster and Hyde as the really bad example. It sounded like that, too, with the children all talking on top of each other as they discussed their day.

Diarmuid was eyeing Hyde uneasily, wondering about leaving him with the kids for a few minutes while he checked on Tora. The Berserker been better than his counterpart had seemed to expect with the little ones. He mocked and sneered at them freely, but he seemed to find them less irritating than Diarmuid secretly did. But it had been concerning how he'd eyed young Kay, eldest girl among Ritsu's orphans, as she left the table to run to the hall beyond where there was a water closet.

"Diarmuid, look," said Gil, pointing as the night lizards scuttled around the door. The little familiars so rarely appeared with Tora, and almost never without her.

Diarmuid looked, and frowned as the vague foreboding he'd been feeling flowered into a certainty. "Something's wrong." They'd heard nothing from Tora, despite the night lizards and the dimness outside.

"Oh goodie, something's finally happening," said Hyde happily. His red eyes acquired green glints and he disappeared into the cloak of Presence Concealment.

The Great Hall doors creaked open a little more, revealing an empty corridor and and the big keep double doors opening onto a courtyard full of stomach-churning emptiness, distortions Diarmuid couldn't focus on. He moved toward the open door. He didn't know what was going on, but he knew how to react.

Springing forward, he kicked the door closed. "Jack! Go as well."

Jack jumped up, green sparks dancing in her eyes. "Kill and dismember?"

"Yes!" Diarmuid had his swords in his hands. An emptiness had slipped through the door before he'd slammed it closed, and now it crept around him toward the table full of children. It puzzled him that he could both see and not see the entity but he was too good at his job to be slowed down by such mysteries. He lunged at the emptiness, one sword low, one sword high. It compressed, avoiding both blades, but he could feel when the invisible enemy's attention—and aggression—focused on him rather than the children.

He exhaled, analyzing the mental blueprint of the keep he'd constructed over the past weeks. The stairs to the underground floor were housed in a little room with a doorless opening to the Great Hall, with a narrow door, normally closed, on the far side leading to the corridor sandwiched between the Great Hall and the outer wall. But now that door was cracked open. That could have been Jekyll leaving, but—

"Gil, get the children someplace safe," he ordered, stepping and slashing at the emptiness. It dodged him once again, jumping back further into the Hall, away from both the stairs down and the exit.

When it counterattacked, Diarmuid's only clue was the emptiness vanishing. He swept his swords around defensively. Metal skidded against one blade to his left front and he flicked it away, even as something else bit through his armor and into his flesh on his lower back.

"There's more than one," called Gil, as he herded a trio of confused children toward the stair entrance.

Ritsu followed him. "They've come for the portal!"

Diarmuid blocked another invisible attack and whirled around to trip a distortion in the air. He felt the strike, but once again, a blade (small, not a sword) slice through his armor.

One of Gil's portals hummed open and three swords pierced the door on the opposite side of the stairwell. Then he gestured the children down as Diarmuid continued to keep the two unseen attackers from getting closer to the stairs.

At the base of the stairs, more portals hummed. Ritsu shrieked, "Where's Kay?" just as swords zipped away. Several men cried out in pain: invaders who had made it downstairs under the cover of whatever hellsent stealth blanketed the castle.

Gil poked his head back up the stairs a few seconds later. "Kay's not down here. The villagers have barricaded themselves in the kitchen. I'm taking the kids out through the root cellar."

Eye contact served as acknowledgement and then Diarmuid switched from defense to offense, driving back the slower of the two distortions. He would buy time for Gil, and then he'd have to go find the missing child himself.

Ritsu kept hearing Gil's portals humming into existence as she ran down the hall behind her orphans, and the sound of his projecile swords zipping away from her. Nobody else screamed. No more bodies thumped to the ground. But enough blood had already splashed the walls.

There'd been three men in forest uniforms moaning on the floor from being pierced by the Archer's swords, and then more portals had hummed, and the moans stopped. Gil had baby Lulu in his arms and little Pan on his back, both with their faces hidden against him. But Ichigo, eldest and already so traumatized from his time as a fairy mount, hopped over the bodies easily. When he glanced over his shoulder at Ritsu, he had a grim look on his face. Her heart clenched and she squeezed her foxette so tightly it chittered.

The adults kept talking about how Ritsu was lucky, but what good was Ritsu's luck when it hadn't been able to save Ichigo from the nightmares that tormented him nightly after Serendipity had sent Merlin away? What good was Ritsu's luck when Tora had been hurt so badly by the Sovereigns? What good was luck when her world was dying?

Gil sent his swords clattering into a room at the end of the subterranean hall and then darted after them. When Ritsu skidded into the empty storage cellar, Gil was already boosting Ichigo up to a narrow hatch. Her foxette ran down her arm and leapt, catching onto Ichigo's pants with tiny claws and clinging to him as he wriggled through the opening.

"Clear," he hissed.

"Be careful! They're invisible," Ritsu hissed angrily, even as Gil hoisted Lulu up into Ichigo's waiting hands. This was madness. "Why didn't you send me up first?! I at least have a little—" The look in Gil's eyes, like she was an adorable idiot, silenced her.

The distant sound of metal clashing together and running feet sent her surging forward toward the window. As soon as Gil had pushed Pan into Ichigo's hands, he made a step for Ritsu and boosted her up. Ichigo had backed away from the hatch to let Ritsu pull herself up. She was the biggest of them and it was a little bit of a squeeze.

As she squirmed and Gil pushed on her feet, a rough male voice said, "Aha, here we are!"

Ichigo gasped and Pan squeaked. Ritsu blinked, peering into the shadows, and then shoved herself through the opening and stumbled toward the big soldier who'd grabbed Ichigo by his hair. He had a short sword in his free hand.

Not Ichigo. Not again.

The foxette on Ichigo's shoulder squealed and leapt into the soldier's face. With a grunt, he slashed at the familiar. It shrieked, the sound a knife in Ritsu's heart. Then she'd wrapped her arms around Ichigo and tumbled with him away from the soldier, landing hard on her shoulder and head as she cushioned the smaller child against her.

"You!" snarled the soldier. "You're the girl—"

Archer's portal hummed open, and the soldier gagged and then gurgled. Ritsu opened her eyes. Even with blurred vision, she could see the blood spraying from the soldier's throat around the sword that had impaled him.

Then the sword evaporated and the soldier fell. Gil finished slithering through the hatch and grabbed Pan and Lulu under each arm. "Ritsu, you okay?"

She tried to talk, and realized she still felt that knife in her heart from the foxette's injury. Ichigo struggled against her and she opened her arms to let him get up. Then she stared up at the twilight sky, thinking absently about how sometimes darkness was more than a lack of light. The sun hadn't set, not yet, but it was still so dark…

"The foxette…" said Ichigo uncertainly.

"Oops!" said Gil. A moment later, he placed somegthing very small and warm on Ritsu's chest. The foxette chirped wearily and Ritsu slowly wrapped her hands around it.

"My head hurts," she said thickly. She could feel how injured her foxette was.

But not dead. Not gone like Tora's Aleron…

Ichigo pulled Ritsu to a sitting position and then said, "This mist…"

Gil looked down at the low-lying mist rising from the ground around them. Then he put Lulu on his head and lifted Pan to his shoulder. "Stand up now, Ritsu. We have to hurry."

Slowly, Ritsu stood up. Between the injury to her foxette and the bump on her head, she was just about able to follow instructions but not much more.

Gil shook his head and then whispered, "Jack, Jack, Jackie…" before herding them back behind the outbuildings toward the back wall of the keep.

A moment later Jack bounded into view, her face and hands covered in blood and her green eyes blazing with fury. "Ritsu's hurt!"

"Keep your mist away from us, big sister," advised Gil. "They can't handle it."

"Of course not," said Jack scornfully and the mist parted around them. "Why did Ritsu get hurt?" She ran over to her charge and danced around her worriedly. "Will Mommy be mad? I was dismembering like Saber said!"

"And eating, I see," said Gil, pushing aside some skeletal shrubberies near the wall.

Sulkily, Jack said, "Had to use the mist. There's bad guys out there. Servants. What are we doing now? Should I kill them all?"

Ritsu reached out to stroke Jack's pale hair. " We can't let them have the portal."

Sharply, Gil said, "We can't let them have you. Jack, I'm getting them out of here and then I'm going to see what I can do about the invaders. What would Serendipity want you to do?"

"Protect Ritsu," said Jack decisively, before giving Ritsu a worried look. "She's got a funny look on her face, Archer."

"She'll be okay if you can keep her alive," said Gil briskly. He snapped his fingers and a portal opened right beside the far wall. "Okay, kids. Here's a new game! I'm going to toss you through my portal. You're going to see a lot of gold, and then you're going to be in the forest. Hold your breath until you see the forest. Jack, you're first!"

Once Diarmuid was confident that the children had made it to the root cellar, he slung himself around his invisible enemies and threw open the Great Hall doors once again. Jumping into the courtyard, he looked around. Just visible through an evaporating low mist were several corpses with their chests ripped open, arranged in a rough path around the side of keep. Other distortions shimmered, leaving trails in the mist that really was one of Jack's best weapons.

The older girl of Ritsu's orphans, the girl Kay, stood on the courtyard swing looking both frightened and determined as she stared at the bodies left behind by one of her new playmates. Diarmuid thought she couldn't be more than six or seven, but she faced the violence before her with a grim fortitude that made him angry.

Then, all at once, the field of stealth cloaking the invaders in the courtyard dropped entirely. A cool breeze blew the remnants of the mist into nothingness. Almost two dozen armed men appeared scattered around the courtyard. Too many of them were around the swing. While corpses hadn't rattled the little girl, the sudden appearance of five armed men descending on her made her shriek in terror.

Before Diarmuid could respond, there was a dark flare of magical energy from the wall and a black-armored figure jumped into the midst of the figures around Kay. Diarmuid blinked, almost recognizing the figure. She scooped up the girl with one arm, while sweeping a sword—a familiar sword—around her in an arc of crackling black lightning. The soldiers scattered.

Diarmuid's heart pounded as it hadn't since he was summoned here. "Artoria?" he whispered, stepping toward her.

But if it was Artoria, she was severely weakened as well as blackened. Although her initial mana burst had driven back her enemies, he could see that was literally all she had going for her. Though she remained ready for the next assault, it was courage over a hollow shell.

Tora, Diarmuid realized. Artoria was Tora's Demi-Servant. That was Tora saving Kay. And she would stagger and fall under a concerted assault.

Shaking his head, Diarmuid jumped again, landing beside her. "Let me help, Lady," he said, flourishing his swords.

Artoria gave him a furious look. "If you want to help, pretty boy, get us out of here."

Diarmuid ran an experienced eye over the field of soldiers moving toward him, and he added what he saw to the two invisible figures he'd battled inside, both of whom qualified as serious threats to a distracted warrior. When a big, blond man covered in scars jumped down from the roof of the Keep, Diarmuid immediately recognized him as the same kind of Servant as Artoria—except not weakened at all.

He glanced at wide-eyed Kay, and nodded, sheathing his swords. "As you command." Then, taking the liberty of sliding his arm around Artoria's waist, he tightened his grasp and once again jumped as only he could, carrying Artoria and the child with him into the forest beyond the keep.

Gil came around the fortress just in time to see Diarmuid leap away with Tora's Demi-Servant form in his arms. Wryly, he muttered, "How romantic," before taking in the soldiers who'd invaded the keep. If he'd kept count properly, that meant that of all Serendipity's Servants, only he and possibly Hyde were left within to repel the assault.

He leaned against the front keep wall, watching the soldiers run around, considering the possibilities. That he could kill all the mundane soldiers without trouble was not in question. But there was much more than the mundane at work here, and revealing exactly what he could do before running away didn't seem like very much fun.

"Oy, kid!" called the blond, scarred Demi-Servant who had been moving among the soldiers. "You look too weak for a good fight. Surrender, so I don't waste my time."

Gil considered this, too. Then, grinning, he said, "Nah!" He skipped away from the Demi-Servant's grab, and then ran toward the castle's front entrance, still wide open from the invaders' entrance.

He didn't get very far before the Demi-Servant snatched him up again, growling. "I said—"

Gil's smile flickered angrily and he hissed, "Mongrel." Then chains slithered around the Demi-Servant's feet and yanked hard. They almost pulled him off his feet, but he flipped like a cat, his thews bulging as he yanked back.

But it was enough of a distraction for Gil to kick off from the Demi-Servant's scarred chest. He did his own backflip, called his chains back to him, darted past several mundane soldiers like they were mist, and then he too was out of the fortress and into the forest beyond.

Author's Note:

For various life reasons I'll be on an every-two-weeks schedule from here on out, but I think I'll be consistent. I put it on my calendar! And I'm expecting chapters to be a bit longer—more like this chapter than the last few. Thanks for sticking with me this long and I hope you'll continue to enjoy the story.