Chapter 13

"M...er."

"Mas...er."

"MASTER!"

Jolting awake, Illya's heart beat furiously as she sat up from the snow, pupils dilated as she whipped her head from side to side, half-convinced that she was still stuck in the cup.

Frigid wind stung her cheeks as snow pelted the rest of her body, the only source of light in the darkness being the crimson blade that shone dimly, vaporizing all the snow that came into contact with it. The wielder of the lightsaber was kneeling next to Illya, a look of rare concern on her pale face as Berserker's free hand went to Illya's back to support her.

"Are you alright Master? You fainted just now, and I had to carry you here while fending off our pursuers." Berserker summarized for her while remaining alert, yellow eyes darting to the left and right while she spoke.

"I, I fainted?"

"Yes. You also screamed and thrashed once or twice while I was carrying you. By the time I managed to shake off any enemies on our tail, your breathing and heartbeat had become incredibly shallow, so I was forced to stop and administer first aid to you, Master."

So it was all just a hallucination. A mix of disappointment, anger, and slight joy filled her heart with the realization. Seeing her parents once again…

No, she had to focus right now. She had almost been killed, and she couldn't afford to get caught in another ambush again. Checking her Magic Circuits, she realized that despite the weather, she was actually uncomfortably warm from the amount of heat they were outputting. As soon as she realized it, the pain from supplying Berserker with mana hit her like a truck.

"Kuh!"

She bent over in agony, struggling to keep herself together as what felt like molten steel coursed through her body.

"Master, if the burden is too much then just order me to dematerialize!"

Illya barely heard Berserker over the blizzard and her own pain, but just as she was about to order her to go into spirit form, she spotted something shambling out of the darkness far behind Berserker.

"Behi-!"

She barely finished the word before Berserker through her saberstaff, the crimson blade slicing through the air to cut the figure in half before flying back like a boomerang into Berserker's palm. However, it wasn't the only one.

More shadows crept out of the darkness, some fumbling along, others slowly crawling across the snowy land, while still others seemed to walk on all fours. Their shape and size varied, though they mostly seemed to be humanoid. Berserker stood up and readied herself for combat, raising her saberstaff as her left hand sparked with electricity.

But it wasn't just in front of Berserker. The sound of shuffling footsteps, of things dragging themselves across the snow alerted Illya to their presence, and she looked behind.

The first visible thing was a pair of perfectly normal homunculus legs, missing several toes, and then the upper body came into view with several holes torn in it, exposing the inner organs. The last thing to become visible was the face, which besides the fact that one side was completely melted and disfigured, was a generic homunculus face that she saw at the castle all the time. And then it clicked for her.

This was the Einzbern wasteyard, where the failed homunculi and remnants of failed experiments had been thrown for centuries.

The Einzberns regularly experimented with homunculi in an effort to improve their craft to reach the Root, and while in the past few decades their efforts had turned to creating the Lesser Grail, they had still developed various types of homunculi for the mages in the Clock Tower and other organisations to purchase. The Einzbern mages in the past didn't always succeed in developing their homunculi despite their reputation, so before Justeaze came along and they killed themselves in despair, they had dumped their failures in a section of the forest near the Einzbern ancestral grounds. Not all were dumped here, some were cremated, while others were reused as magical batteries of a sort, to fuel further experiments, and there was also the pool below the castle as well. However homunculi thrown into the wasteyard were those that the mages could possibly come back to in case they suddenly thought they had further potential, and they also served as a security system that prevented mages from invading the castle, an extra layer of security.

Over the centuries, the amount of failed homunculi dumped here had accumulated, and some even interacted with each other to create fascinating mutations, some ugly and grotesque, others functional and elegant. Of course, the mages in the Einzbern family kept track of these mutations, and integrated some of the more useful ones into their magecraft. Their numbers swelled over the years, becoming massive hordes that roamed the expansive waste yard within the boundary field. In spite of their numbers, they never tried to attack the castle, in part because of the Bounded Fields, but also because the magi of the Einzbern family possessed the fail-safe termination commands for all the failed experiments.

But there was another reason to why they were dumped there, and even older origin that dated back to the days when the castle was first built and occupied by the Einzberns.

Back then, their craft was still in its infancy, and their reputation as alchemists and homunculi makers didn't exist. Their master, the Magician of the Third Magic, disappeared, leaving them to fumble in the dark as they tried to recreate what she had achieved. As such, they experimented on nearly every topic within alchemy, and sometimes outside of it as well, in hopes of finding a way to the Root. Prior to creating homunculi, they also experimented on humans and animals, refining their magecraft until they were able to create artificial life. In the course of their experimentation, a certain magus decided to use the wolves that lived close to the castle for an experiment.

These wolves were native to the land, and the mages of the Einzbern hadn't bothered with them since they didn't really obstruct their work, so they left them be. They were normal gray wolves, mundane and natural. However, the Bounded Fields close to the Einzbern castle affected the wolves, forcing them to adapt and gain sharper senses, in order to counter the sensory confusion caused by the Bounded Fields and hunt normally. However, they didn't gain mystery, instead simply enhancing their biology and evolving to counter magecraft.

This piqued the interest of the Einzbern mage, and so he decided to take some wolves and introduce an evolution factor to their bodies, making them able to adapt to adverse conditions and hostile entities much faster. After all, if they could naturally adapt to magecraft, then what would happen if that adaptation was artificially enhanced?

This experiment was soon forgotten by the mage, simply being done because they caught his attention for a moment, the wolves left to breed by themselves in the woods. A spur of the moment decision, a simple whim of his.

It wasn't long before they caught his attention again. After a few years, mages of the Einzbern family had started disappearing in the forest. A search party was formed, intending to put down any hostile magi that had infiltrated their territory. After a long search in a howling blizzard, the magi found the culprits. A massive pack of wolves, munching on the bones and marrow of the recently deceased magi. At first they couldn't believe it, that some mundane predators had killed these magi. They were soon proven wrong when the pack attacked en mass, nearly wiping out the entire search party and their familiars.

The wolves had senses sharpened to such a degree that Bounded Fields which interfered with the four senses were almost useless against them, unless they were operating on maximum power while linked to leylines. They had also gained a certain degree of magic resistance, courtesy of the failed experiments that magi had simply released into the surroundings as deterrence. Some had also used the wolves in other experiments, and the surviving wolves had passed down ways of adapting to these experiments. The results were a huge pack of wolves equipped with anti-magic capabilities, as well enhanced intelligence, strength, agility and stamina courtesy of the evolution factor introduced by the first mage.

They were unable to wipe out the wolves back then, and so the first mage who had experimented on them proposed a solution. Provide them a steady stream of food to satisfy them and prevent them from attacking the castle. After all, even though they were marginally more intelligent, they were still beasts of the wild, and so wouldn't attack the castle for no reason, if they had free food. Besides, if they had free food, they might not evolve anymore to adapt, and the day would come when the strength of the magi outnumbered them. That was the logic of the plan that he proposed, and it was accepted.

The failed human and animal experiments were thrown into the woods for the pack to feed on, giving them a source of prey that wasn't the Einzberns. Wandering in that section of the forest was strictly forbidden, and strong Bounded Fields were erected to contain the pack in that section of the forest. After that, the problem was considered solved, and they continued the practice of throwing failed experiments into the "waste yard" up til now.

Unbeknownst to them, the wolves had continued multiplying until they hit a peak, at which point they had started cannibalizing each other due to food shortage problems, until only the cream of the crop were left. Now, they fed on the failed homunculi in the forest, but kept their numbers low on purpose to avoid a similar crisis from happening again, with "weak" newborns abandoned to die in the snow.

Illya had already learned about the history of the waste yard in her lessons, so she instantly shot to her feet with renewed urgency.

"Berserker, cut us a path through our enemies!"

"Understood!"

The Servant sprang into action as she leapt into the fray, swinging her saberstaff left and right while her left sprayed crimson lightning indiscriminately, the energy leaping from one enemy to the next. Heads flew, but no blood flowed as the stumps were instantly cauterized by the heat before they could even leak a single drop of blood. Monstrosities that were no longer recognizable as homunculi swung at her, but their abilities all paled against her Servant levels of speed. Arms, legs, torsos, they all went flying into the frigid air, the wind tossing them to and fro, littering the snow with body parts.

Illya trudged through the snow at a steady pace behind her, staying a fair distance away from Berserker, but not straying too far.

"Zelle."

The blue birds formed once more from strands of white hair, a single thread connecting them to Illya's scalp. They hovered above Illya, firing upon any homunculi that got too close. Neon blue shots pierced their heads, dropping most of them instantly. For the few that survived even headshots, a couple of shots to their limbs was sufficient to immobilize them.

Still there were some that proved troublesome, wielding different forms of weaponized bodily augmentations that were unconventional, and difficult to deal with.

Berserker was currently facing one such specimen. Ducking under the swing of one homunculi, she decapitated with a swift flick of the wrist, but another one surged forward, gas, or more accurately spores, puffing out of various artificial holes in its body, as well as its regular bodily orifices. Berserker jumped back, avoiding the wind that blew some of the spores towards her, and leapt forward to decapitate it as well, but she was blocked by the homunculi spraying out a sudden burst of spores, forming a dense cloud around it. Unable to get through, she instead opted for her Alter Lightning, several arcs of energy lancing towards it from her left hand.

The moment it hit the spores, it triggered a chain reaction that caused an explosion, knocking back the rest of the freaks behind it and setting some of the closer ones on fire as well.

Still more came at them from all directions, and even with Berserker executing impressive acrobatics that took out as many as three homunculi in a second, it still wasn't enough. They were crawling out of the darkness like swarms of ants, undeterred by the numerous amounts of their brethren killed. Illya was also starting to feel pressured, being forced to deploy four of her familiars at this point to fend off the homunculi closing in on her. The strain of supporting Berserker while forming the familiars was starting to push her to the limits, sweat dripping down her forehead even though it was negative degrees, the sweat freezing before it even hit the snowy ground.

*KRAKOOM*

Illya whipped her head in the direction that the explosion came from, and Berserker did the same.

Dozens of meters away, a figure unlike the homunculi they had been fighting appeared. The man, it seemed like, didn't have the albino skin and white hair characteristic of homunculi, instead having a black beard and dark skin, along with a swarthy face. His garments also suggested a Middle Eastern origin, possibly from Israel judging from the Star of David talisman clutched in his hands.

"Who are you?"

Illya's question went unanswered, and she was forced to continue fending off the other homunculi while they charged forward with renewed fervor.

Berserker on the other hand had perfect vision even with the blizzard, and was able to see his entire figure. Immediately, she threw herself at him, labeling him as a larger threat than the other homunculi.

*KRAKOOM*

A second explosion resounded in the area, this time a lot closer to Illya. She instinctively raised a ward of thread to deflect whatever was aimed at her, but it was already deflected by Berserker, the saberstaff intercepting a blast of invisible energy and redirecting to the surrounding homunculi, blasting them backwards. The man took the chance to get closer, muttering a chant under his breath.

At this point, Illya finally got a good look at the man after he got closer, and saw an abomination.

Attached to his back, was another homunculi, but the flesh of the homunculi and the man had melded together, like what some body horror films showed. In essence, the homunculi had parasitized the man and was controlling the magus, with the magus ego either suppressed or completely destroyed. Most likely, the man had tried to invade the Einzbern ground for one reason or another, and had been overwhelmed by the homunculi, finally succumbing and being parasitized by this one homunculi designed specifically to take control of humans, and magi in particular.

Illya instantly turned her attention to the man, her familiars raining down bullets on him as she tried to analyze his magecraft while Berserker dealt with the other homunculi crowding around them, charging straight at him once there was a clear path forward.

"ORYA!"

Berserker swung at him with a savage backhand slash, fully expecting to bisect him.

*Brzzzt*

Incredibly, the lightsaber somehow shorted out right when it came into contact with his body, the blade simply fizzing out of existence. She quickly twisted the saberstaff so that the other blade would cut him, but that blade disappeared as well while the other blade suddenly appeared again after it faced away from him.

For a moment, she briefly glimpsed Arabic letters shining under his sleeve, before she was repulsed backwards, sliding away on the snow. Telepathically, she contacted her master.

"Master, I saw some symbols like these under his sleeve. Do you know what they are?"

Illya received her message and a vague impression of what she'd seen earlier. She compared it to everything that she had learnt and deduced an answer in an instant, firing at the homunculi all the while.

"He's using some form of numerology magecraft, which involved engraving the formulas on his entire body, and he might've carved some formulas around here as well!"

A magus's territory was where they were the most dangerous, and it would make sense for the mage to have carved the formulas on the ground to create his own territory, even if he was parasitized. After all, if he could fire off spells, then territory creation wasn't beyond him. However, since he was a traditional magus, there was a method to fight back. A duel between strong magi was a battle of not just pure power, but also a battle of concepts. Once she knew the foundation of his magecraft, she could come with a plan to counter it.

But just as Illya finished forming a plan to counter him, she heard it.

"AROOOooooooooooo"

The howl cut through the blizzard, reaching the ears of everyone present, be it Master, Servant, homunculi or monster. The blood drained from Illya's face (not that it was any different from her usual face) when she heard the howl, deeper, longer and louder than any normal wolf howl should be. Attracted by the sound of combat, by the smell of flesh and prey, they had arrived.

"They're here."