Chapter 174
Stumbling through the damp sewers and dark tunnels, the ethereal legs carried her forward unceasingly, her entire body fading in and out of view like a mirage. With wounds covering her entire body, there wasn't any trace of the armor that bound her anymore, leaving her with only pale skin, and the thin strips of cloth that covered her chest and waist. Black veins stood out on her pale skin, and every few steps she took, vomit and black bile was heaved up out of her mouth onto the ground, mixing in with the rest of the sewage that flowed down the long passageways.
Meandering mindlessly down the a random path, she drove forward as her mind remained in a haze, the pain from Kotomine's ritual digging at her core, sending her further and further away from stability, while the lack of mana from the blocked connection hindered her ability to recover, if there even was a way to recover from it. As of now, she was simply clinging on to existence out of pure stubbornness, her Battle Continuation long exhausted a few hours back.
After walking for an interminable amount of time in the unlit tunnels of the sewers, with the stench of Fuyuki's filth filling her nostrils all the while, she finally came to a stop at a dead end, rusted and worn bars gating the way ahead for her. At that point, she was unable to do little more than clutch at the gaps in the bars and stare listlessly at the darkness beyond it, her body sinking to the ground before she was even aware of it. Sliding down against the wall, she closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the cool metal, the stink and the wetness of the sewage against her body a feeling drifting to her from far away.
It was difficult to tell how much time had passed before she was found, but when her presence was finally detected by her searchers, she was merely a transparent ghost collapsed near the bars, the tethers tying her to the world all but gone, save for the grudge that composed her core weighing her down and struggling against all odds to last even just one second more.
Without a second of delay, the familiars squirmed into her see-through body, congregating where her Spiritual Core would be and turning into a mass of slimy bodies that assumed the shape of a ball there. A few moments passed with nothing happening as the worms tightened their grip on each other, locking into specific patterns with each other and weaving a tight thread of connection between each other and the Servant they were trying to rejuvenate from the doors of death. Once the lines were established, the procedures engraved in the mystical nature of the worm familiars began to function, enacting the core concept within the Mysteries of one of the three founding families.
It was just slightly at first, but eventually the tunnel began to turn a hue of vomit that dazzled the ceilings of the decrepit tunnel after reflecting off the surface of the sewage, casting everything in a sickly green light. Lines of turquoise shot through the worm's bodies, turning them into the spitting image of circuit boards, the pathways coursing through the writhing pale skin that turned rigid upon contact with the mana that ran straight from the source through the familiars and into the Servant.
While 'absorbing' was meant to be more of a method that benefited only the magus, it was possible to apply this technique to others and enact bindings between the target and other things too. Reversed-spells in the Matou magecraft was simply giving to others, shedding curses, injuries or other spells from one's self, and in this way it was also possible to provide assistance to others by letting them 'absorb' the magus's own mana, or 'absorb' negative energy that was plaguing them. Gathering the fragmented pieces of her damaged Spirit Graph, he triggered the Grail's summoning abilities to fill in the gaps, essentially performing a resummoning that melded the information from the Throne with her current Saint Graph, a lesser form of summoning that simply built on what already existed, which when combined with the energy link to the Grail and his presence as a Master to anchor her presence against Gaia, was enough.
By linking up with Avenger through the lust worms that were specifically engineered to create and process energy, it was possible to construct a conduit that would help siphon energy into the damaged Servants Spiritual Core and provide the Servant with enough energy to maintain her own existence, a sort of spiritual first aid that was only possible with the gems that had come from the Edelfelt manor, providing him with energy, as well as his own knowledge and techniques that allowed him to establish contact with her core and provide her with energy. After all, if he could create seals that could bind an entity such as a Servant, then building a link to one to provide them with mana wasn't too hard in comparison.
With every passing moment, Avenger grew more and more solid, the lust worms encased by her steadily stabilizing body as they were burnt out one by one, spent from having to shovel a not insignificant amount of mana that was far above their usual limits, burdening them with a task that they could only complete by sacrificing themselves. The worms quite literally, burnt themselves out, and there weren't even ashes when they self-destructed, turning into mana themselves to further feed Avenger's growth and recovery, leaving behind a steadily smaller ball of worms wrapped around her Core that shrank as she grew stronger.
Soon, the ball of worms vanished beneath her solid skin as she appeared to fully regain corporeal form, appearing as a regular human now instead of a traditional ghost, though her looks and aura were anything but that of a normal person. It wasn't long before her eyes fluttered open again, her mouth and nose sucking in a deep breath that she didn't actually need, though her bodily reflexes demanded her to do so. Standing up, she stared at the grate that stood in her way. Casually gripping the iron bar in the top left with one hand, she pulled, and it came off like it was just sand, dust falling onto her head as the concrete anchoring the grate broke loose. She created a gap big enough to walk through, but just as she did so she heard something that made her freeze.
The scuttling of hard pincers against the wall, a staccato dripping that was like many needles thrown against the sewer fluids that oozed slowly past her ankles. When she looked back, there was an old man standing there, with not a single hair out of place save for the corner of his cloak that ruffled slightly as she turned, then turned smooth. It looked like he had always been standing there waiting for her to wake up, but he had definitely just arrived, Avenger was sure of it.
No longer under the influence of the armor that compelled her to act under the orders of Angra Mainyu, she didn't attack him straight away, but she could easily sense that something was wrong with him. It took one to know another, and the air radiating of him was just as rotten as the filth in the sewers they were in, if not more so. Opening his rubbery mouth, he moved his lips and spoke to her first, initiating conversation after seeing that she was just standing there and staring at him.
"Good evening, Miss Avenger. I trust you are feeling well as of now?"
The polite greeting felt incongruous with his appearance and the environment they were in, but Avenger took it in a stride and was able to respond in kind.
"Who are you?"
Her head was still a bit fuzzy, though her condition was mostly fine at this point. She didn't feel any aggression coming from the old man, and despite her position as an Avenger, she didn't feel any need to kill the man in front of her, perhaps because he veered far from the qualities that she hated. It seemed likely that he was the one who had assisted her, so it was for the best that she refrained from laying her hands on her potential benefactor as well.
Seeing that she wasn't acting strangely or in a hostile manner towards him, Zouken allowed a slight grin to slip on his face, his black sclera indecipherable as he answered her question.
"I am Matou Zouken, the patriarch of the Matou family. Perhaps you know of us from the Grail already?"
A quick search through her memories confirmed Zouken's words as she browsed through the basic information given to her about the war, with the Three Founding Families included as part of the information package. In that case, why was he here, and saving Avenger of all things?
She voiced her thoughts, and Zouken answered them directly.
"Though I may be part of the Three Families, I still wish to win the Grail for myself, and though you may be a perversion of the rules, it would be a waste to let your talents disappear without using them to the fullest. Would you be interested in assisting me in this battle? In return, you can have your wish on the Grail."
It was a blatant lie, but how would Avenger know? The information given to her from the Grail didn't specify the sacrifice needed to achieve it's true function, or the motive behind the creation of the Command Seals beyond being a mark of a Master and a contract of obedience.
While he waited for her to answer, he couldn't help but think about the sequence of events that had led up to now. The machinations of the dark presence inhabiting the Grail had led to the rules of the Holy Grail War being broken, summoning forth two Extra classes that weren't supposed to appear in a normal War. However, instead of seeing this as an error that required rectifying, like the Tohsaka's might, he instead saw this as an opportunity that he could exploit. With knowledge of how the system worked and familiars that could be fashioned into Command Seals, he had started to scheme and plan to interfere in the War the moment that breach in the rules was apparent.
Getting Ruler was the first step, and influencing Sakura was also part of his set up as well. Though he had discarded the plan of nurturing Sakura as a vessel as well, he could keep her as a backup plan in case he was unable to obtain the Einzbern Master, or something happened to the true Grail vessel. It was unexpectedly easy to lay his hands on Ruler, with Avenger acting as the agent that allowed him easy access to Ruler's unconscious body, and after a tense but swift operation, he was in control of Ruler and supplanting her obligation to the Grail. Being one of the original architects of the Holy Grail War had its perks, and his access to crucial information pertaining to the system was a massive boon that allowed him to achieve such feats as bending even Ruler to his will, though admittedly it was a half-baked job in the end.
The attack on his main source of familiar and constant guerilla strikes on his mana batteries in the form of his worms spread throughout the city constantly depleted his stocks, and in the end he was forced to constantly hunt for targets throughout the city to simply fuel his existence and create more familiars to bind him before they could be all destroyed. Rider's actions set him back by quite a lot, and though he wasn't forced into a corner, he was still heavily handicapped with the few resources that were available to him.
As a result, he was unable to control a Ruler at her full power. Instead, she had been reduced to a familiar that was barely a rank-up from a lower-class Phantasmal Beast in terms of power, with the majority of her skill and intelligence gone, though her unique talents and powers remained. He didn't need to worry about the energy keeping her sustained since she was directly fueled by the Grail, but he didn't have the energy to expend to keep her absolutely obedient to himself while in full possession of her faculties and strength, so he sacrificed most of her ability by allowing his worms to burrow into her and claim control over her container, turning her into a puppet that he could pilot without worrying about any deviations from his orders.
It was easy to control, but in the end the results that Ruler had produced were disappointing, though he was still able to salvage something from the mess she had wrecked, and to an extent, she was still usable, except in a vastly reduced capacity. At this point after her battle with the witchcraft user, it was doubtful that she could go head to head with a competent Sealing Enforcer, let alone a full-blown Servant. He placed her under hibernation so she could recover as much as possible to get her to peak condition when she could be deployed, and then went looking for replacements for the piece that he had just lost, so he could continue influencing the chess board.
This led up to now, with the spoils of war that he had taken from the mansion, along with the fruits of his labor that he had been stocking up ever since he was chased out of the mansion, serving as catalysts and fuel that allowed him to establish a link with Avenger and sustain her core that was about to fade away from the double-blow of Kirei's exorcism and the loss of mana supply from the Grail, manipulated by All the World's Evil into shutting off, cutting her of from any chance of recovery. If he had been a second late, it was likely that he would simply arrive at a mass of grudges that would eventually be anchored into the land as a spiritual taint from the death of Avenger, her only legacy left in the War.
That was not the case however, and he had managed to make it in time. He could sense his worms still inhabiting her container, suspended between the physical and spiritual, which would make it doubly difficult to remove from her if anybody wanted to cleanse her from his control. Slowly but surely, they were morphing into false Command Seals that would all but guarantee his control over her. The process was going smoothly, now all he had to do was stall for time and wait until the entire operation was completed. In the meantime, it would be best to present a polite facade and ask for her cooperation like she was just a normal rogue Servant without a Master. With any luck, they could formalize the contract and speed up the process, allowing him to establish dominance over her as soon as possible and prevent her from becoming a loose cannon.
While he was confident in his own prowess, he knew that Avengers were not to be trifled with lightly, and the sooner that she was subdued, the better. Having a double-edged sword in his hand wasn't something he wanted, and after seeing how easy it was to lose control of her even when under the thumb of the corrupted Grail's dweller, he was even more anxious to crush her free will. He was perfectly willing to sacrifice her autonomy in battle in exchange for having a safe and malleable puppet to use, like Ruler had been. In addition, she was far stronger than Ruler, which was easily sensed by him, and she would still prove to be a powerful piece even if she lacked the ability to govern her decisions and employ tactics in fights.
Zouken stared at Avenger as she stood there silently, waiting for her to answer. While he didn't have a concrete idea of her identity, just one look at her features was enough for him to make an educated guess, based on the obvious trend that he had observed from the other Servants. Well, it made no difference to him who she was in the end, since it wouldn't matter after the Command Seals came into effect.
Then he felt it, the worms forming a full Circuit that morphed into a vessel for the mana that Zouken tricked the Grail into giving, leveraging the automatic systems dealing with the dispensation of Command Seals into investing them with a power that bordered on miracles. With this, he was able to control Avenger directly by siphoning the energy from the Command Seals to create an enchantment that bound her actions to his words, the worms functioning as the physical enchantment that the Seals were carved on. If need be, he could always reroute the energy from his half-dead Ruler's back as well, and send it to Avenger to bolster his control over the Servant.
With the Command Seals finally in place, he was able to stop worrying about Avenger suddenly going berserk on him, and it was also the last step to solidify her efforts in recovery. Expending the equivalent of around half a Command Seal, he injected the mana into Avengers container and rejuvenated her to normal levels. Though she was able to maintain physical form, her mana reserves were running on fumes, but with the prana donation, she was now able to act as usual.
"I see."
Abruptly, Zouken's face twisted into a grimace, the cohesion in his body starting to fall apart as he sensed something very wrong occurring to the familiars in Avenger's body. Confusion and fear warred in his mind, but he maintained rational judgement, quickly drawing on the energy from Ruler's still remaining Command Seals to sustain himself and ward off the sudden pain that was spiking in his very soul.
Avenger simply watched as the old man convulsed in front of her, his skin rippling and stretching in unnatural ways as he suffered from the flames that scorched his familiar in her body, the natural consequence of inhabiting a Saint Graph fully corrupted by hatred against the very foundation of the system that birthed it. If Heroic Spirits were called forth by the dreams of humanity, then what was a Heroic Spirit which hated Humanity? It was a contradiction of the system that was originally meant to save Humanity from the Calamities, the great Beasts, but there were those who wished for humans to perish, and so in the same vein Avengers were a possibility, though impossible to call forth in normal circumstances. Their Saint Graphs were so warped to the point that just by existing, faint traces of grudge and hatred were left on the environment, and any humans close by were immediately affected by them, pushing them to the brink as heat filled their chests.
Zouken was no longer human, so he was actually well-protected from such effects, but after inserting the familiars straight into her chest, his lack of experience in dealing with an Avenger proved deadly. Just by being there, his worms were roasted alive, the Saint Graph a deadly poison and fire mixed together that completely screwed over his familiars and sent excruciating pain running up and down his body, or the collection of insects that served as tethers to anchor his soul to the world. More than that, a thick mixture of blazing curses were sliding down his veins, filling every inch of his body, including the familiars not currently present, with the novel experience of being burned from the inside out combined with the sensation of corrosion wearing and eating away at his body.
He had experienced plenty of pain before, and with each day his soul aged even further, an indescribable feeling that was the primary factor in driving him mad into obtaining the Grail for immortality, along with the fading memories of the Winter Lady. However, such intense suffering was a first for him, and the more his familiars succumbed to the blissful rest of release, the more in danger he was of actually dying. Some were literally dying from pure pain, bodies going into shock as the nerves overloaded, and he was not keen on finding out how it felt.
With a desperate swiftness honed by his overwhelming desire to live, he cut off the connections to him and Avenger one by one, leaving only the default line that would allow him to act as her anchor to the world while not providing her with energy. He was skilled enough to achieve something like this, so he could serve as proof of her existence to prevent Gaia from rejecting her while allowing the Grail to shoulder the bulk of her prana expenses.
However, this meant he lost the Command Seals binding her to him, the worms completely lost in her body as they were consumed by her Saint Graph and used to fill in the holes left in her.
If he hadn't tried to stick his worms there, he wouldn't have been spiritually attacked since Avenger didn't wield such powers, but his direct interference with her Saint Graph placed himself in danger of the classes inherent nature, placing him in grave danger. It was an inevitable conclusion, as there was no other way he could have rescued her from the brink of dissolution.
Gradually, he felt the pain gripping his soul recede, the flames and corrosion vanishing as the false Command Seals left his grasp. The energy within the Circuit of worms gushed out, flowing into Avenger and nourishing her as the mana enriched her own stocks. All of the energy that had been meant to maintain the seal on Avenger's free will was gone, ironically used to strengthen her instead.
If Zouken could sweat now, he would have, but there was still a chance that Avenger could be willing to work with him, and he wasn't somebody who would back down so easily, since without her internal grudges harming him, there was little she could do now to actually threaten him. There was no harm in trying, even if the chances were small. Putting his body back together after the violent shake up it had received, he spoke to Avenger once more.
"Will you fight by my side?"
Before he could blink, he was already split in two.
A rusted broadsword bisected him cleanly from shoulder to waist diagonally, a breeze of wind moving the surface of the sewer waters, sending a few stray pieces of light trash tumbling around. Instead of the sleek black colors that it had possessed when she was alive, the Clarent was now a former shade of itself, the ceremonial sword no longer looking the least bit ceremonial. The once sharp was now blunt and chipped, looking like it hadn't been polished for years. The engravings on the hilt had all but worn away, the red reduced to a splotchy brown, with pieces having flaked off entirely. The pommel was brutally treated, with every side conceivable flattened until the roundness that it once possessed was no longer visible. The most glaring defect of all though, was the tip of the blade. It was a break that started from a quarter of the blade, extending all the way up to where the edge curved to become a point. Unless it had met extremely excessive force, there was no way any sword would be broken like that. Jagged edges were all that remained, a crude, rough row of uneven spikes and broken steel that was far sharper than the actual edge itself.
Zouken's body fell apart with that one slice, his familiars dissembling the physical representation as they fled into the murky liquid of the sewers, squirming and sliding as they slipped into hiding from Avenger. Some took to the sky too, their wings fluttering rapidly as they shot off, while others skittered across the dry walls, merging with the shadows until they disappeared from sight. In a matter of seconds, he had disappeared, with nothing left save for the putrid scent of his presence that mingled with the stench of the sewers.
Avenger stared as he made his escape, standing there silently. Once he was gone, Clarent disappeared from her hands as well, and she clambered through the opening in the sewer grate she had ripped apart. As if Zouken had never appeared, she continued onward, searching for an exit. With her energy supply to the Grail rebuilt by Zouken, she was free to exist as long as no one interfered with it, and Angra Mainyu could do little to break through it, since Zouken had used the most basic and deeply rooted systems that he was far from attaining control over.
With the Command Seals from Zouken and the armor from her summoner gone, she was free to act as she wished, and there was only one thing that she needed to do.
At the same moment of her full integration with her Spirit Graph and her revival, everyone felt it.
Saber shuddered as she leaned on Shirou's shoulder up the stairs, but she passed it off as simply the pain from her wounds, continuing the stairs with her Master as if nothing had happened.
In her unconscious rest, Lancer's floating consciousness turned restless, no doubt tossing and turning if she had a physical body.
Caster shivered, her eyes flickering about, but after checking her Bounded Field and finding nothing, she relaxed, attributing it to her shot nerves after the battle they had just fought.
The unease that Rider felt was transmitted to Sakura, expressing itself as a grimace which Shinji ignored as he took care of her.
"So, the secret boss has yet to be vanquished. Fufu, I will show her the true power of a Saber the next time we meet!"
"Mmmm, I might have to consume the forbidden 'Infinity Blood' (chestnut paste) next time to beat her."
As expected, both Assassin and Berserker's reactions were the same.
Eventually, they would all face Avenger one day, but for now the calamity of Arturias laid low, instead of going straight for the kill. After a while, she finally found what seemed like an exit. Popping open the manhole, she jumped straight up, bypassing the ladder and shooting into the air, then allowed the manhole to fall back in place as she turned into spiritual form mid-air, vanishing before anyone saw her.