Disclaimer: The following chapter contains heavy violence, gore and disturbing content. Reader discretion is advised. In addition, at the scene transition, I highly recommend putting on the song Leap Wishes/Blissade (Egregori + Raphael) by Keiichi Okabe and Kakeru Ishihama. It serves as the battle theme.


There is no way that they're going to be able to cover this up.

Shirou's ankle twisted as he spun around the corner. A spike of pain shot up his leg, another failure of his body that he had to ignore. He had fallen far behind his Servant in her haste to approach the battlefield, there was no time to waste on pain. Thick columns of smoke billowed out of Shinto into the evening sky, the silhouettes of skyscrapers torn in two faintly visible through them. His heart clenched as he looked at it again, and his circuits burnt as he pushed himself even further.

Can't let it happen again... not again... never again...

Traffic had come to a complete standstill, with every lane of the Fuyuki Bridge diverted to be flowing out of Shinto. Police officers stood around helplessly trying to direct an increasingly agitated mass of civilians that grew ever larger as more vehicles were abandoned. Shirou ran past them all, but after more than a few collisions with pedestrians, he switched to jumping across the sea of car roofs. He could distantly hear multiple yells of annoyance, but his goal was clear:

I can't abandon Berserker. Not here, and never again.

The fire in his lungs was stoked further as he entered the sulfur sarcophagus. His panting was growing worse and worse, his entire body was screaming in agony, and a wave of nausea started to build up, threatening to roll over him and destroy his sense of balance. He put all of those sensations in a drawer in his mind and locked it tightly. It wasn't good enough to be human, or even the garbage magus that he had tried to become—

"Without thinking, I can crush the feeble meatsack that is your body," she said, yellow eyes stern. "Every Servant is stronger than you, faster than you, better than you in every possible capacity. At our prime we were the heroes at the pinnacle of humanity, and even limited by these class containers, we are empowered simply by virtue of not being human anymore."

She stood up from her crouch beside him. He couldn't follow in kind, still trying to deal with the bruises on every inch of skin, but his eyes never left her.

"So how are you going to beat me?" she asked. "What makes you think you can?"

"It—" He coughed. Even his throat hurt. Her chokeholds were fierce. "It doesn't matter—"

Her fist impacted the soil next to his face, sensing a splash of dirt all over him and making him sputter.

"Yes, it does, you blundering fool," she said through a tense jaw. "Determination and will only gives you the ability to stand up again while your heart still beats, but how will that help you against an enemy that can rip your heart out before you even see them? What can you do?"

Shirou was silent in the face of her question, and she slowly lifted her hand from the ground.

"When you can answer me," she said as she began to walk away, "I will continue training you."

The only thing he could do against an opponent that could do almost everything better than him...

Another city block passed him by as the earth rumbled and a roar shattered whatever ambience had developed from this burning husk of a city filled with the dead and the dying whose screams echoed endlessly and he had to press his hands against his ears to get them to shut up shut up shut up shut up SHUT UP—

His ankle pulsed so strongly that his vision blacked out momentarily. When he could see again he was on the sidewalk, pieces of rubble strewn all around.

Then the drawer unlocked itself, and he hurt.

Bile and blood mixed together as he heaved, for minutes barely able to keep himself upright enough to not land in his own sick. His arms shook violently along with his abdomen, their strength and energy having abandoned him, leaving in their wake only acid and complaints.

The groan of steel and cement rang out, a guttural moan that was soon drowned by the crushing noise of another building collapsing. Just a few blocks in front of him, glass was crashing upon the asphalt as a tower began to fall. He watched helplessly, hoping, praying that there was no one inside, and then he covered his eyes and ducked his head down, for a mass of dust fell down with it.

Hours, years, seconds, days passed him by as the ground shook and the wind howled. He wasn't able to keep track, all he could do was count his rapid heartbeats against the rhythm of the earthquake. The soundscape did not end when the dust ceased to buffet him, it only changed from an artifice of metal and concrete to cries of pain, roars of exertion, and the thunder of magecraft.

He lifted his head and tried to wipe at the dust on his eyes, but only succeeded in putting on another layer of dust. He opened them anyway, blinking away as many particles as he could. His blurry vision revealed a wrecked street, cars and bodies thrown through empty windowpanes lined with shards of glass, buildings straining at their support columns. His attempts to get up to search for survivors all met with failure as his body refused to respond. His muscles had given up, even if he hadn't.

Another loud roar resounded, and from the ruins of the collapsed building slithered out a thick purple snake head, jaw opened wide as it flooded with violet energy. He could tell it was pointing if not at him, near enough to him that he wouldn't be able to escape its blast.

A spiked metal ball attached to a long silver chain shot from the ground, and Shirou could at last smile.

Berserker...

Her scream of rage would have intimidated any more humanoid foe, and as it was the snake head turned downwards, trying to aim at her. Its motion allowed the spiked ball to enter an eye, and the way the beast bellowed in pain, immediately trying to shake away the implement of pain. But Berserker didn't let up, intensifying her own scream and pulling down hard on the chain.

The snake, large as it was, could not fight against her strength and smashed into the street. Instantly, the Servant used the chain to throw herself upwards, and her other arm wound back to throw her other spiked ball. It made a large enough impact through the skull that allowed her to pull two jagged swords from their scabbards and stab it into the bone fracture.

One final wail of mortality silenced the snake head, and it dissolved into golden dust. Berserker jumped too high for his own gaze to follow, probably in pursuit of the rest, but he was still awashed with a wave of relief. She was, inadvertently—

A hand gripped the back of his shirt collar, and he let out a cry of pain as the arm pulled him up and through the air. Every time they landed, the shock of the impact hurt him further, and he couldn't even clench his jaw hard enough to stop himself from groaning as they drew farther and farther away from the battlefield.

It was only after enough of the torture to make him consider trying to black out again that they made one final landing, and he was thrown onto a rough stone roof. He hacked, and blood spattered on the ground before him.

"Once more, your stubborn idiocy has put you in a situation where you lost control of your destiny, boy," Berserker hissed. "The fact that you were unable to obey even the simplest of instructions to stay away from the fight speaks volumes about the thickness of your skull."

"Ber... ser... ker..." he gasped out, barely managing to turn his head to face her. The sunset was behind him, and so he could see her expression, a sculpture of fury, lit in its entirety. "I... needed... to..."

"What, to die?" she said. "You could have thrown yourself off of the bridge on your way here if you wished to accomplish that. No, you wanted to participate in a battle between combatants who you can never hope to match. You wanted to—"

"Help you," he said, trying to get his breathing under control. "I needed... to help you... couldn't leave you... to fight on your own..."

"Think, boy!" she shouted, her claws flexing and unflexing. "You weren't thinking! You are a useless magus and a terrible Master, what could you possibly do to support me?"

Weakly, he lifted one arm into the air, his final command seal raised high. Before he could speak, she grabbed his wrist and began to squeeze tightly enough to strain the cartilage.

"If you use this last seal to restrict me one more time," she uttered quietly, "I will kill you where you lie. You have betrayed me enough for a lifetime."

Her eyes were flint and iron, ready to set alight his mortal tapestry, but Shirou would not flinch again.

"Berserker... by this... Command Seal..." he spoke through a clenched jaw as her grip began to crush at the delicate bones, "Kill Avenger... don't let her... hurt anyone else..."

Finally, the pain became too much, and he lost consciousness.

[Never again.]

Berserker let go of his wrist, allowing his head and torso to hit the ground once more. Already, the small trickle of mana that she had been dealing with for weeks was rapidly growing into a deluge, a flood of power that washed through her entire being. The wound she had sustained in her abdomen healed, the broken femur repaired, and her ribs finally stopped pressing so intensely on her lungs. She inhaled, and her tongue could taste the blood of Avenger in the air from this far away.

"...perhaps I misjudged you, Shirou Emiya," she said quietly, flexing her fingers. "No, you are still the same boy you were before... but you have taken one step forward into manhood."

She took one last look at his collapsed form, red hair with white strands, blood stains on every corner of his clothes, and sighed.

"I will not thank you, especially when you cannot hear me. But I will admire your will, even if you never did come to the answer."

She walked to the edge of the roof, bending her knees in preparation for her return to the battlefield.

"Goodbye," she said, and leapt off. The mana coursing through her veins strengthened her enough to make her leap more than a kilometer forward, and she couldn't help but grin as she skidded off of another roof and into another jump. The air rushed by her at exhilarating speeds, and it took her only seconds to arrive at where she had defeated the last snake strand.

"AVENGER!" she bellowed, cracking tile where she hit the roof of another skyscraper, though she did not remain on it for long, as in an instant another snake appeared to tear a piece out of the building. Her ball and chain was already in her hands, and with a spin she threw it down in a similar tactic to earlier.

Though it dodged away from the immediate threat of the spiked metal, it was not able to avoid her own impact into its skull, fast enough to crack through the bone. The other spiked ball followed her into the mock-gore of its inside, and she dragged it through every inch of nerve and bone and muscle she could see. It was not able to scream for long, and soon she was bathed in golden dust as she began to fall to the ground once more.

Rather than stemming her descent, she tucked in her limbs to fall even faster. The asphalt splintered under her as she hit the ground, but there was no time to recover. She threw herself to the side as another round of searing energy exploded where she had stood.

"Stupid gnat!" The voice boomed as it refracted through the alleyways, following her footsteps as quickly as the blasts of energy carved through the smoke. "You have irritated me long enough!"

Racing under the ragged sky, Berserker passed through the shattered remnants of what had once been a pleasant evening, destruction hot on her heels. The sun continued to dip below the horizon, abandoning the city to suffocating darkness. Distantly, she could hear screams and whimpers echoing from the windows above her. The sound of a child's crying caught her attention, and her gaze quickly locked onto a young girl crouched at the end of an alleyway, covered in part by rubble. She scooped her up as she ran by, rapidly jumping out of the way of another serpent.

She grimaced as the building shattered under its gargantuan form.

This cannot continue any further. Too many have died because I was weak.

The girl would not stop crying and begging for her mother, and all she could do was take her somewhat farther away from the rampaging Servant. As she placed her underneath a smaller office building, just beneath a sturdy-looking metal awning, Berserker felt her own legs seethe in empathy pain.

The little girl's legs were bent at odd angles, and she could see fragments of bone piercing through the skin. Blood was erupting from multiple wounds. She would not live long.

She had been rescued only to die so soon after.

The soothing singing of her older sister helped take her mind away from the pain as she tried to push down her whimpers. They had just set her arm back into place, her first fracture, and no matter what the healers had done to help her, she couldn't stop the tears.

But her sister was there, and her sister held her as they hurt her enough to heal her.

The memory shattered in front of her eyes with another cry. She had dealt so little with children of this age that she felt helpless, especially with one hurting this badly.

"I am so sorry, child..." she said quietly as she hugged the girl tightly to her, clutching at her throat enough to restrict the air supply. The cries intensified, plateaued, and then weakened before dying out entirely.

She let the girl go, checking for a pulse. For now, her heart still beat, but at least she would not suffer as she passed on.

Her fists clenched as she heard another ear-splitting roar from outside. There was never any time to heal, or even to mourn. The Command Seal would only empower her for so long, and that time was too valuable to waste.

She turned away, blocking the slight of the small bleeding form from her mind, and leapt out onto a rooftop once more. While she had been agonizing, more damage had been done. More corpses littered the streets, more buildings shattered. Avenger was out for blood.

Her breathing accelerated as she let go of the death grip her sanity had put on her Madness Enhancement for so long. Nothing else could be held back to stop the other maddened Servant. There was no more time.

Her vision was colored in blood red.

She roared.

Avenger answered with a barrage of magical blasts, but she was already gone, and the building beneath her crumbled from the force she exerted upon it. Her claws extended further as she landed upon another coil of serpent, but she wasted no time as she began to run up the strand. The head attempted to curl around to fire at her, but one of her blades came out in a flash, and the strand was chopped off, dissipating into gold dust.

"ENOUGH!"

The gargantuan Servant swept a massive hand at her, the claws extended to box her in. Rather than make a futile effort to avoid the attack, she braced herself and allowed her body to be seized. Even as the Avenger hauled her off her feet, clearly aiming to throw her into a building, Berserker dug her own weapons into her enemy's skin. The chain snapped around the thumb and index finger even as the spikes cut flesh, and Avenger screamed in pain.

Not wasting another moment, she left the chain behind and began to race up the massive forearm. The loss of the weapon was nothing, it was hardly her only option, and she dug her heels in to leave bruises on the scaled flesh as she ran.

"Die already, you insignificant pest!" Avenger's purple eyes, bloodied from an earlier attack, narrowed at her. "I will not have you obstruct my vengeance!"

Were she in a more rational state, Berserker would have made a comment about her being the source of her own vengeance. Killing one's own Master in a fit of rage on the verge of attaining the Grail could have engendered some sympathy from her, but the trauma had twisted the Rider into the worst possible class, and now she threatened both the secret of magecraft and tens of millions of lives.

As it was, Berserker simply growled and ran even faster, avoiding more energy blasts as she came closer and closer to the head. The undamaged hand came up for another attack, trying to sweep her off entirely as the other arm shook in an attempt to throw off her balance.

"You—!"

She turned the attack to her favor, leaping at the approaching hand and digging her claws into it. Avenger didn't even have time to scream or flail before she used the leverage to throw herself upwards once more. This time she slammed into the fallen servant's shoulder, a hand yanking one of her swords free to slice into her enemy's neck.

A scream of rage erupted from Avenger as all of the Servant's hair strands curled upwards to aim at her, a wall of purple light that she had no way of dodging or blocking. But pain was an old friend to Berserker, and even as beams of energy tore through her ribcage, carving a bloody hole near her Spiritual Core, she did not stop. She only roared once more, ignoring the blood pouring into her eyes from a cut in her forehead as she blindly leapt towards the monster's ear.

It was a mistake.

With nothing to grab onto, nothing to brace herself, she was left open when Avenger got her other hand around. The fist struck her directly, hammering her downwards, her body smashing a crater in the soil where she struck the ground. Avenger wasted no time in pressing her advantage, throwing more punches to drive her smaller enemy deeper into the earth, the massive servant snarling her rage with each strike. Once she'd had her fill of merely physical attacks, she drew in her serpents, uncaring of her own mana supply as she poured her rage into a massive blast of raw power.

When the light had faded, she sighed and leaned her weight onto a steel tower. A rain of glass shards fell from the top floors as it strained to keep her upright.

"The hate... why hasn't it dulled...?" she huffed. "The more I kill, the more I destroy, the less there are to... wash away the memories."

She inhaled deeply, only to stop as a low growl began. Avenger turned her gaze to the crater once more, too deep for her to see to the bottom.

One bloody hand rose and clutched onto the cliff edge, followed by another. Shock and fury washed over Avenger as Berserker's bloody form clawed its way upwards. Her clothes were falling apart, one of her legs was limp, a fragment of femur pressing outwards. There were multiple holes in her torso, and her right arm was hanging on by a thin thread of tendon and muscle.

But she stood, growling.

"Ki... ll..." she mumbled. "Kill... you... I'll... kill you... I'll kill you..."

Berserker took one step forward, her vision flickering from red to white to black, tinted in hatred and rage and the memory of verdant hair.

"I'll kill you... I'll kill you... I'll kill you!"

She finally turned her head upwards, and saw the stunned anger in Avenger's eyes, tasting it as much as she tasted the blood leaking in her mouth.

"Outrage..."

Her claws became as long as her arm, and every zone of agony on her body disappeared for just a moment. She remembered the way that man had shook his head with a forlorn expression at how much she allowed herself to be hurt just to win a fight, and the rage took over.

She roared.

"AMAZON!"

She knew her legs were not functional beneath her, that they could not do what she asked them to do, but she did not care, as her Madness Enhancement did not care. She leapt higher than ever before and felt the bones in her legs shatter and crumble to pieces, and she did not care.

She screamed.

Avenger was already shooting at her, and she let the energy hit her, she felt it try to hurt her as that man had hurt her, and she did not care. Both of the monster's hands were scrambling upwards to attempt to knock her out of the sky, and with two swipes she had clawed through them. The droplets of blood followed her as she plummeted, her final companions.

"No," Avenger yelled in fear, "no, no, NO!"

The terror in those violet eyes was too satisfying to not relish in as she collided with the Servant. Her speed gave her the momentum needed to smash through the monster's skull, and though her legs no longer existed and her eyes were so covered in blood that she was near-blind in the darkness, she tore at the brain matter within. Skin and fat and skull fragments and grey matter flung around her as she continued to fall.

There was one final gurgle, and then everything around her turned to golden dust.

She knew she would not survive this, and she did not care. She could feel herself begin to disappear, her remaining ligaments already evaporating. There was no more pain, no more fire of rage, no more blinding hate, only the fall.

Her gaze met the stars, and then the moon, and in it she swore she could see the smiling face of its Goddess.

She smiled back.


Well, after deleting author's notes multiple times, trying to figure out what to say and what not to, here's what I think I've come down to: I wrote this in five hours; it was one of those wonderful bursts of inspiration like Iskandar, Santa Alter, and Hundred Face; and I feel very happy with it.

Thank you to my Loresingers as always: Aberron, TungstenCat, Exstarsis, Kat-2V, and KentaKazami. I would like to give a particularly special shout-out to Kat, for not only having fixed my fight scenes from being okay to being amazing, but also for starting the TVTropes page for The Saga of Shirou's Summons, and putting it on the Fanfiction Recommendations page for Fate/stay night. I had delusions and fantasies of that happening when I first started writing this, but I never imagined in my wildest dreams that this story would ever become as popular as it is. It may seem cheesy and you've likely heard it before, but to everyone who has followed, favorited, reviewed, and simply just kept track of this story without doing any of those, thank you. Thank you for allowing me to take some time out of your day to tell these silly stories.

Today, I shall recommend the following to you: Anchor of my Heart by TungstenCat, A Farewell to Unlimited Blade Works by TheSkipRow, and Dusk to Dawn by FrostedMelody.

I really hope you read the second half with the recommended music. It was both my main aide and the inspiration for this saga as a whole, so I feel it goes very well with it. The ending theme for this chapter is Empty Tone/Aethervox by Keiichi Okabe.

If you'd like to give some feedback on this chapter, or partake in the company of myself or my Loresingers, you may join us on the Saga Discord. The invite code is GkXXAYE.

Thanks for reading, and Happy Valentine's Day.