Disclaimer: I do not own the Fate franchise it belongs to Kinoko Nasu and Type-Moon.
Everything and Nothing
Chapter 12
"Uh-huh…what was that about countermeasures in place just in case Forvedge and Icecolle tried to intercept us along the way?"
Rin dully looked out of an upper floor window at the motel they were staying in. Outside, the streets of the small Romanian town – the name of which she couldn't be bothered to remember – were filled to bursting with the walking dead. There were hundreds of them, maybe even more than a thousand, rotting bodies shambling forward on lurching steps with broken legs. Others crawled on the ground, pulling themselves forward with twisted, clutching fingers. Torn skin hung from their tattered frames, leaving withered flesh and bloodless veins exposed for all the world to see.
Natasha looked irritably at Rin, not deigning to give the Japanese arch-magus the satisfaction of hearing her admit to underestimating the lengths their enemies would go to in order to stop them.
"And to think we arrived in Romania smoothly enough." Sakura cheerfully replied. The other Japanese arch-magus present was busy with an Azoth Dagger, cleaning it with alcohol and then further disinfecting it with ultraviolet light. "Maybe they were trying to lull us into a false sense of safety?"
"I'm more concerned about Lord Edelfelt." Rin replied, before gesturing out the window, at the groaning horde outside. "You can't just pull something like this out on short notice. This takes time, preparation, and resources, to say nothing of being a risk in more ways than one."
"Like losing control of the horde?" Sakura asked.
"That," Rin conceded with a nod. "Or word getting out and compromising the Masquerade."
"…Lord Edelfelt may have been exposed." Natasha said after a moment, finally looking and sounding concerned.
"She's still the official representative of the Clock Tower." Sakura said. "They won't directly move against her. Against me, though, to say nothing of Edelfelt's men…"
"…most likely," Rin concurred. "Forvedge and Icecolle plan to use all our deaths as a way to turn the tables, and force Lord Edelfelt to negotiate on their terms."
"Damn them." Natasha hissed. "I should have known there was something…suspicious, about the innkeeper."
"Don't get too worked up." Sakura said, briefly pausing as she heard gunshots from the ground floor, where the rest of the team had barricaded the doors and windows. "We haven't lost yet. In fact, we're more than capable of turning the tables ourselves."
"Do you have a plan?" Natasha asked.
Sakura smiled, letting the moonlight shine off her Azoth Dagger's blade. "Necromancy is just another discipline in the school of Spiritual Invocation." She said. "And you won't find better invokers than those with Imaginary Numbers. In fact, you could even say it's what we're born to do."
Sakura paused, and then shrugged. "Well, I've never really dabbled in necromancy…" she continued, and which wasn't exactly true either. After all, she secretly kept the vengeful spirit of the sister she'd unintentionally murdered as a familiar, not that anyone here outside of Rin – both of them – knew (or needed to know) that.
"…but I know the theory well enough." She finished. "Enough so that I can figure out the reanimation and obedience protocols of those things out there."
"And that helps us how?" Natasha asked.
"You're not actually planning on taking control of that horde out there and turning it against its casters, are you?" Rin suspiciously asked.
"I could," Sakura admitted, though her face showed she thought very little about the idea. "But I won't waste any of our time with tasteless mockery. Besides, what do I do with all those corpses afterwards? I've got better things to do than play undertaker."
"So…?" Rin prompted with a vague, prompting gesture.
"I need actual zombies to work with to figure out the complete mystery behind them." Sakura replied.
"WHAT?" Rin and Natasha chorused, but Sakura was ignoring them now.
"Let's see…what words fit best…oh, I know." She muttered before snapping her fingers. "Right…a bounded field first then: containment field, two by two meters."
A shimmering cube of translucent energy appeared around Sakura, who retreated to a corner. Then she cut open her left wrist, blood erupting and then pouring out, vanishing into a portal leading into Imaginary Numbers Space. "Hey, Sakura!" Rin shouted in concern. "What are you doing?"
"Patience, Rin." Sakura said with a small smile at her sister's parallel self. "Trust me. This is my kung fu, and it is strong."
Rin stared, mouth working as she looked for and failed to find the right words, before finally giving a curt nod. Sakura let the blood flow for a few minutes, and then powering up her crest, sealed her wounds with a simple spell. Then she gestured, her shadow flaring out, and then teleported in several zombies from the street below.
They rushed at Sakura, only for her shadow to wind around them. "Blood is the stuff of souls." Sakura softly said, even as the blood she'd poured into Imaginary Numbers Space splashed onto the zombies.
Instantly, the fiends relaxed, their groaning subsiding even as Sakura's shadow released them. Instead of attacking, they bowed, Sakura acknowledging them by releasing her bounded field. "My blood, and my soul, are stronger than your family's ever will be, Caules." She said in a contemptuous whisper.
"What was that about tasteless mockery?" Rin asked while stepping next to Sakura, and giving her a raised eyebrow.
Sakura responded by swinging her Azoth Dagger, and reducing the zombies to dust and dry bone which clattered against the floor. Her circuits flickered, and her irises briefly flashed.
"There are Forvedge and Icecolle magi over at the church." Sakura said, putting away her Azoth Dagger. "They're using Human sacrifices to fuel the spell, and conducting a constant ritual to maintain and control the horde."
"…if we can interrupt that ritual, we can put the horde down in a single blow." Rin said after a moment.
"The question then becomes how to get there without having to face the horde out in the open." Natasha remarked.
"Easy enough to do." Sakura said, kneeling down to pick up one of the bones on the ground. She briefly looked peevish, before once again drawing her Azoth Dagger with a sigh. She then used said dagger to carve Chinese characters into the bone, before whispering a spell that lit up about a third of the bone with corposant. "There we go…anyone who carries a torch like this should be invisible to the horde."
"Huh…" Rin said as she gingerly took the offered bone and witchfire torch. "…I see what you're doing. By using the bone of a former zombie as part of the mystic code, you can use resonance to blind the senses of other zombies."
"Pretty much." Sakura said, already crafting another mystic code from another bone. "Not all of us should go, though. The enemy is watching through the eyes of the horde. If we all just suddenly up and disappear, they'll get suspicious, and very defensive."
"They must think we remain barricaded within this building." Natasha said with a nod. "And thus focused on this place, blind to the dagger sliding around to stab them in the back."
"Yup." Sakura said as she lit another bone and witchfire torch. "Don't try and be heroes while we're gone."
"…our backs are to the wall," Natasha said after a moment. "And there is no land behind the wall. We stand or fall here."
Sakura nodded, while Rin gave her another look. "You don't actually think we can get past the horde this easily, do you?" she asked.
"Of course I don't." Sakura replied, already heading for the door. "But you already know this."
"…underground?" Rin asked with a sinking feeling, and Sakura grinned.
"Underground." She said, and causing Rin to sigh.
"Well, that went well." Rin remarked as she and Sakura splashed through ankle-deep sewer water, arriving at a rusty iron grating that overlooked the creek that ran through the town. Between the bars, up on the street across the water, more zombies were shambling along, blind to them thanks to Sakura's mystic codes.
"Still," Sakura said with a sigh. "Of all the opportunities to take advantage of to lose our Edelfelt minders, I never expected a zombie attack."
"They must really want us both dead." Rin grimly said. "Going this far…what are the chances all these corpses belong to the people of this town and its surroundings?"
"…too high." Sakura replied after a moment.
"Yeah, I think so too." Rin said, clenching her hands into fists. This reminded all too much of her own sister's rampage during the Fifth Holy Grail War. Only, unlike Sakura Matou, the Forvedge and Icecolle didn't have the excuse of being partly-possessed by a nascent god of evil, to say nothing of being driven nearly insane by over a decade of rape and torture.
No, they deliberately murdered all these people and desecrated their bodies over a petty grudge.
"I hate to sound like someone from a movie or even a video game," Rin continued. "But let's gut the bastards."
"Which bastards?" Sakura asked.
"All of them." Rin replied, and Sakura smiled.
"My thoughts exactly." She said. "Now, you said you had a plan to get to the church, while also throwing the Edelfelt henchmen even further off our tails?"
"Yes, I did." Rin said with a nod. "As far as they know, we'll be using the sewers to get to the church. Instead, we'll use the sewers only to get to the water, before getting to the church another way."
"And that is…?"
Rin smiled mischievously, making it Sakura's turn to raise an eyebrow. "More importantly," Rin said. "Any ideas on how we make it look like we died at the church while also taking out this disturbing show of necromancy?"
"…explosion? Big, flashy, noisy, and very destructive explosion…?" Sakura suggested.
"I think I can manage that." Rin said with her smile growing wider, and again causing Sakura to raise an eyebrow.
"Right…now what…?"
Rin pulled out a diamond, and pressed it against the bars. The diamond flashed before crumbling into dust, along with the bars. Then Rin took out a few sapphires, and murmuring a spell, conjured a bubble around them both.
Then with a splash, they walked their bubble into the creek, their mystic codes keeping the zombies nearby from noticing. "Well, this is…subtle." Sakura said while scratching her head as they walked underwater, and causing Rin to smile a little smug smile of victory.
"Have you ever watched Pirates of the Caribbean?" Little Rin asked as she materialized, draped around her big little sister's shoulders. "Curse of the Black Pearl, to be more exact?"
"No, why?" Rin asked curiously.
"This feels a lot like the scene were Jack and Will used an upside-down boat to walk underwater." Little Rin answered.
"Huh…great minds think alike then." Rin said.
"This is either madness, or brilliance." Sakura dully said.
"Madness and genius are just two sides of the same coin." Rin primly replied.
Sakura and Little Rin shared a look, but decided to just let it go.
The crypts under the church were still, silent, and dark.
Then a wall gave way, bricks, plaster, and mud washed inward by a torrent of cold water, which slackened as a bubble plugged the gap. Then Rin and Sakura walked out of the bubble, the former sealing the wall behind them with a gesture and a few more sacrificial gems.
"…look." Sakura said, pointing to the staircase on the far side of the crypts.
"What…oh…"
"Yeah, oh."
"…so instead of zombies, we've got…undead skeletons now?" Rin asked while scratching at her head. Sure enough, there were skeletons guarding the stairway, encased in rusted armor and holding shields paired with various weapons. Mostly swords, but also axes and spears.
"Looks that way." Sakura remarked.
"…you ex's family just loves being so edgy." Rin grouched.
"I think it's the Icecolle influence." Sakura said while making a vague gesture. "That, and all the brains and good sense leaving the family when Fiore decided she wanted an ordinary life."
"…stupid magi and their stupid pride…" Rin spat. "…never thought I'd ever say that, but there you go."
"I cannot bring myself to disagree." Sakura piously said, to which Rin responded with a disgruntled grunt.
As they approached, lights suddenly flashed in the skeletons' eye sockets, and they brandished their weapons in Rin and Sakura's direction. The sisters didn't hesitate, dropping the now-useless mystic codes and firing off Finn shots on full-auto.
The skeletons next to the stairway fell quickly, taken as they were by surprise, but others now loping out of the crypt's shadow used their shields to block the Finn shots. Undeterred, Rin crushed a ruby, then snapping her fingers, baked half the crypts with a jet of blue-white flame that left the tombs, the floor, the pillars, the walls, and the ceiling glowing cherry-red with heat.
Next to her, Sakura held up a hand, fingers looking like they were holding something in the air. "Hadron Formation," she said. "Erebus and Nyx!"
A singularity opened up between her fingers, which she tossed into the distance. There the singularity collapsed, opening up a temporospatial rift that sucked all the skeletons in her half of the crypts into null space. A moment later and the rift collapsed, sealing up the tear in the fabric of time and space, leaving no way back.
The doors above them banged open, allowing a trio of men in body armor and carrying automatic weapons to charge down. Rin snapped her fingers again, and screams filled the air as fire blazed up the stairs, reducing them to greasy stains on the floor.
"Toasty!" Sakura said with a gesture of approval.
"Thanks!" Rin said, before leaping up the steps on reinforced limbs, Sakura not far behind her.
Wights marched down the church's corridors, tattered flesh and bone encased by rusting armor. Their hands carried great swords, the blades of which gleamed with runes that would let them cut through even modern tank armor like a hot knife would cut through butter.
Sakura tossed another singularity, and threw them all into null space.
Then she blinked, as something flew past her peripheral vision, before afterimages had her looking the other way. Then blood began to dribble out of cuts on her right cheek and the bridge of her noise, causing her to growl dangerously.
Burning white light erupted as Sakura drew and ignited a beam saber, bringing it up with a low hum. Sparks flew through the air as Sakura blocked once, twice, three and then four and five times. Then she held up a hand, and caught the mystic code in a spatial distortion.
"Child's play." Sakura sneered, before crushing the mystic code, and pointing her free hand palm outwards against a wall. "Hadron Formation: Chaos!"
The spatial distortion blew holes through the walls in that direction, and out into the open. A magus stumbled out of the dust, ears bleeding from ruptured eardrums. Then moving on instinct, he jumped back and then ran away as Sakura teleported next to him, only to draw a dueling saber as Sakura teleported again, this time cutting off his escape route.
A feint allowed him to cut Sakura across the chest, and cutting her necktie in two. "Bastard…!" Sakura hissed as she swung her beam saber, and forcing the Forvedge to retreat. "That necktie cost nearly nine thousand Yen!"
Leaping after the Forvedge, she swung her beam saber, the Forvedge dodging before counterattacking. Sakura cut the man's saber in a spray of molten metal, before swinging again. The man dodged, then feinted, opening up the distance while dropping a magical explosive behind him.
The explosion shook that side of the church, the Forvedge relaxing ever so much to try and catch his breath. Then he felt Sakura teleport behind him, barely having the time to look terrified before she cut him in half.
As his corpse fell to the ground, Sakura pulled out half of her necktie from her vest, and let it drift on the wind in disgust. Then she stomped down slowly and deliberately, crushing the Forvedge's head and leaving shattered bone and pulped flesh on the ground.
"…what a waste of time…" Sakura muttered, turning to leave…
…only to pause, as she heard something in the distance, slowly but surely getting closer. Looking out into the open, she stared into the sky, her eyes widening at the sight of something blotting out the Moon.
Bats…giant, mutated bats, each with a wingspan as wide as an adult man's outstretched arms. Madly chattering away as they swarmed through the air in scores, they descended in Sakura's direction, claws bared to rip and tear.
"…you've got to be kidding me!" Sakura shouted in frustration and disbelief while opening fire with Finn on full-auto.
The Forvedge and Icecolle magi all had comical looks on their faces, as they stood entombed in ice in what had once been the church's main hall.
It had since been desecrated, however, with the crucifix chopped up and burned in the middle of the hall. A naked woman lay dead on the altar, her torso cut open with her heart and womb both torn out and most likely burned. Blood coated the stone thickly and stickily, along with more than blood.
"What is it with bad guys and rape?" Rin thought as she slowly walked around the room. The enemy magi weren't dead yet, oh no.
A quick death was wasted on them, after all, a mercy none of them deserved. As she passed them by, she smashed each ice formation in turn, and shattered the body of the magus trapped inside.
As the last of them fell to the ground in pieces, Rin turned to the side doors as they banged open, allowing Sakura to enter. "What is that?" she asked, pointing at what Sakura was dragging behind her.
"One of Forvedge or Icecolle's pets." Sakura spat, tossing what looked like a man-sized bat at Rin's feet. It was dead of course, very much so, its body looking like it'd been folded up several times, bone construction and organ placement be damned.
Spatial manipulation was such a versatile thing.
"…sorry, but everyone here is already dead." Rin apologized.
"And the sacrifices?" Sakura asked.
Rin gestured to the other side of the hall, where corpses lay under cloth, a small gesture from Rin to give the dead some measure of dignity before they blew this entire place to hell. "The horde should be falling apart now, right?" she asked.
"It should be." Sakura agreed. "Which means Romanova will be rushing to rendezvous with us here."
"Then we need to get out before they arrive." Rin said.
"Is the bomb ready?" Sakura asked.
Rin responded by walking behind the firepit, and gently pushing out a contraption of brass and jewels. "If my guess is right," she said. "This thing should explode with the force of a four-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram bomb."
"…where'd you get that figure?" Sakura asked in surprise.
Rin made a vague gesture. "Give or take," she said. "I haven't exactly had the time to write things down, and cross-reference proper comparisons. It should be enough to turn this place into a burnt-out husk, though."
"Alright then…shall we get going?" Sakura asked.
Rin nodded, and punching in a lock on top, started the thirty-second countdown. "Let's." she said, while taking her sister's hand.
Sakura nodded back, and then in a flicker of shadows, teleported them both away. Behind them, the bomb counted down to zero, the gems glowing bright as they deliberately destabilized, and blew the church apart from the inside out in a flower of flame and burning debris.
A/N
If you're at a loss for disposable mooks/filler villains, Nazis and zombies make for great placeholders. Nazis seem out of place here, so zombies it is. Especially since canonically Icecolle – though it could just be Celenike – seems to have a vampiric/Countess Bathory thing going on.
Random dueling saber vs beam saber…no prize for guessing how that would have ended. As for nine thousand Yen (the cost of Sakura's necktie rounded up), it's basically around ninety dollars or so. Not that expensive, all things considered, but that's still a fair amount of money down the drain.