Solenoid Flux
An Evangelion / Fate Zero Crossover
Snippet #3: For the Glory of Another

The kitchen wasn't spotlessly clean, but it managed not to have a particularly lived-in atmosphere. The times that Kariya had been permitted to return to the condo in the past year, he'd subsisted mostly off of instant noodles and canned foods - far too drained to attempt cooking. Still, the place was clean of rotten foodstuffs and garbage, and that was enough for it to suffice as a setting for discussions of strategy.

Under the lamp, a map of the city was spread out upon the dining table, with seemingly random lines drawn clear across it in yellow highlighter. At several of the conjunctions, circles had been drawn with a red ballpoint pen.

"These are the major leylines in Fuyuki," said Kariya. "Generally, to make easy use of the environmental mana that flows through them, mages choose leyline junctions as the sites of rituals and bounded fields."

Berserker, who sat at the opposite end of the table, distractedly nodded his comprehension. Kariya frowned slightly at the response, but pushed on.

"I spent the better part of last night scouting out the major junctions in the city for bounded fields," he said. "Only managed to find two noticeable constructs besides the ones at my old man's house and at Tohsaka's place." He pointed his pen at the location of the Fuyuki Church. "Here." Moving the tip south to the downtown area of Shinto, he stopped at the Fuyuki Grand Hyatt. "And here."

"The first one's where the Overseer is, right?" asked Berserker.

"Yeah," replied Kariya. "We don't need to look very deeply into that one. The other, though ... I'm guessing one of the Masters from out of town set up shop in the hotel they're staying at. It's a pretty bold move, just announcing their presence at the largest leyline junction in town."

"So, none of the other Masters have set up bounded fields, then?"

"At the obvious locations, at least." Kariya pointed at the location of his apartment, in eastern Shinto. None of the highlighter lines crossed it. "This is where we are right now. I've got a basic alert perimeter set up around the apartment building, but it's weak enough that it's barely detectable if you don't know it's there. Our other opponents are either taking the same precautions that I have, or they're situating their bases outside of city limits."

"What about finding this place using other methods, then? Can't they just look up your address in a public record or something?"

Kariya couldn't resist smiling in pride - but the dead side of his face was as unresponsive as ever, and the resulting grin was haggardly grotesque. It was amusing that a Heroic Spirit from another time could be so well-versed in the societal workings of the current era.

"I own this flat, but it isn't listed under my name. Arranged for it last year, when I found out I'd be participating in the War."

"Is that even legal?" asked Berserker skeptically.

"I'm a freelance journalist," said Kariya. "You don't survive in this trade without making a few connections where it counts."

It felt to Berserker as if Matou Kariya and Kaji Ryouji had the same air about them - melancholic and somewhat shady, but underlain by a wholehearted dedication.

"More importantly, though," continued Kariya, tapping the location of the Grand Hyatt on the map, "this person's gonna be our next target."

"Hold on," said Berserker. "Didn't you say we were going to target Tohsaka first?"

"That was the plan, but going by the way the fight went with Archer yesterday, I'm not sure we can take 'em. Best course of action in my opinion is to let somebody else wear him down."

Berserker sighed.

"My fault for performing so badly."

"It actually doesn't have anything to do with your abilities."

"Eh?"

Rather than answering, Kariya pointed at his own eyes.

"You know about the 'Master's Perspective?'"

"You mean, how you're able to visually identify opponent attribute rankings?" asked Berserker. "Wait. You were looking in on the battle through the maid's eyes like I was?"

Kariya nodded.

"Archer's base attributes were mostly in the A and B Ranks. That E Rank Noble Phantasm he was using against you definitely isn't his trump," he explained. "Point is, if he's got something A Rank or higher hidden up his sleeve, even if you went in there and managed to get yourself injured enough to activate Mad Enhancement, there still wouldn't be any surefire guarantee that you'd win."

Limply, Berserker looked down across the map. He'd wanted to be useful to Kariya, but his first engagement had done little more than expose his impotence. It really didn't seem as if dying and getting summoned as a so-called 'Heroic Spirit' had made him any more competent than he'd ever been.

"That tactic we used," said Kariya. "I think the trial run at Tohsaka's place was pretty successful. This time, we should find ourselves somebody from the senior hotel staff ..."

"No," said Berserker. The word wasn't loudly uttered, but it carried a weight of finality.

Ah, thought Kariya. That's why.

It was difficult to comprehend why a Heroic Spirit qualified as a Berserker would be so bothered by injuring noncombatants, but Kariya could work with that. Preferred it, really. Before the summoning, he himself had reservations about obtaining a mindless killing machine as a Servant. The staining of his own hands was not something he sought to prevent; he'd accepted that inevitability as a basic feature of the War. Sakura's freedom, wasn't something that he wanted to color with the blood of innocents if possible. If he fell to the level where he simply didn't care, he would be no different from Tokiomi.

Aloud, he said, "If you feel so strongly about it, we'll just have to change tactics."

Berserker seemed to lose some of his tenseness.

"Sorry," he said. "I know it's not my place."

"It's not a big deal, really. Don't worry about it. I shouldn't have ordered you to do something like that without getting your word on it first."

Uncomfortable that he'd apparently pushed Kariya into an apologetic stance, Berserker changed the subject.

"Is there anything I should know about the defenses of this place?"

"I was just getting to that," said Kariya. "The bounded field the magus set up covers the upper twenty-four floors of the hotel, and a significant amount of the airspace immediately above. Judging by the grandiosity involved, I'd say the creator's pretty arrogant. Probably holed themselves up in the presidential suite on the thirty-second floor - the top level."

"Twenty-four floors of a thirty-two story building ..." said Berserker. "If the field's keeping out intruders, doesn't that mean the hotel's losing a lot of business?"

"That's exactly the thing," said Kariya. "It's not. Regular hotel guests and staff members seem to be able to enter and exit the field without triggering any response. I'm guessing that the defensive mechanisms are keyed to higher-presence existences, like mages or familiars or Servants."

"So, what's the plan?" asked Berserker. "The Master's going to notice it immediately if I simply destroy the field."

"The Grail War is fought mostly under the cover of night. Chances are, the Master'll be resting or asleep during the day," explained Kariya, drumming the fingers of his good arm on the table. "Taking advantage of that, this engagement should be initiated at around noon. It's a bit of a gamble, but I'd like you to walk straight into the bounded field ..."

On the seventh floor of a cheap business hotel in Shinto, a man and a woman played back a sequence of recorded footage on a 13-inch CTR.

"What do you make of it?" asked the man.

"The delay between the initiation of attack and Archer's response was small," the woman replied. "I could accept it if he were somehow capable of sensing the puppet used by the intruder, but my familiar noticed no obvious Servant presence. It would almost seem as if Tohsaka Tokiomi were expecting an attack."

The man nodded.

"It reeks of choreography," he observed. "If the attacker were truly an opponent that Tohsaka had foreknowledge of, he could've acted to conceal the engagement and limit his Servant's exposure. Instead, we're provided with an unnecessary display ... unless the display itself served a purpose? That would be the case if Tohsaka wished for us to believe in the attack of an unknown assailant."

"The use of a Noble Phantasm suggests that the orchestrator of the attack is a Servant," replied the woman. "It is difficult to imagine that thaumaturgical puppetry of this level would be achievable by a Servant any class aside from Caster."

Pressing a button, the man rewound the footage, pausing it near the end of the conflict proper. In the blurred image, a crimson lance disintegrated into motes of light.

"It's possible that we're merely being to led to construct a hypothetical opponent," he said. "The apparent puppetry may not be puppetry at all - merely some form of suggestion. Alternatively, the puppet's behavior could be directed by an individual aside from the Servant providing the Noble Phantasm. That is to say, the weapon is merely a prop."

"But what would Tohsaka gain by fabricating the fiction of an enemy?"

"He obtains a nameless scapegoat, upon which blame for any number of heinous acts could be directed," said Emiya Kiritsugu. "An inheritor of all the sins in the world ... A perfect alibi."

Long before he had given up his name and face for the hundred masks, Assassin had been an apt listener of stories.

The children of the commercial quarter of his city had a tradition of gathering fortnightly in a corner of the bazaar, where an ancient blind woman would speak of the legends of djinn and magi and great warriors. His favorite tale had been of the clockwork horses that the ancient sultans had chartered - metallic steeds said to traverse the skies at marvelous speeds. The sky-carriages created by the men of this era bore little resemblance to horses, but as testaments to the power of human ingenuity, they were no less marvelous.

The station he'd requested of the Nefesh - demanifested atop an airport radio tower in the neighboring city - served a purpose besides satiating his fascination, however. As a harbor of entry to the land of Fuyuki from abroad, there were few locations more convenient.

On the morning after the opening of the War, Assassin's preoccupation rendered itself justified: On the furthest lane from the administrative complex, a Servant's presence entered his awareness, descending from the skies in a private craft. Flitting foward, he visually confirmed the arrival of an opponent party.

'A Servant has arrived at my location with a magus, most likely of the Einzberns,' he thought. 'Judging by the presence she exudes, she is quite strong. Without further qualification, I would judge her to be the Servant of the Sword.'

There was a silence in his mind, but Assassin could faintly sense his Master considering the information.

'If the Servant you have just now encountered is indeed Saber, she can be eliminated as a perpetrator of the attack yesterday evening,' said Kotomine Kirei across their link. 'Lancer, Caster, Rider, and Berserker remain. Prioritize the identification of the former two. What is the situation with El-Melloi?'

From within the Nefesh, a female voice spoke: 'The magus has completed the final touches to his stronghold as of early this morning. The defenses are of robust construction, and we are incapable of penetrating the outer layers undetected. The identity of his Servant remains unconfirmed.'

'No matter,' said the priest. 'Put a tail on the Einzbern, but maintain surveillance of the airport and the JR Station until all Servants are accounted for.'

'Understood.'

Pulling along the small luggage he'd retrieved from a locker in the subway station, Berserker stepped into the palatial front lobby of the Fuyuki Grand Hyatt.

Ironic, he thought, that rather than the workings of magecraft - which were empty nothings before the power of the Angels - it was simple matters like the extravagance of the hotel interior that really brought it home how alien the world before the Second Impact was. The Japan he'd known as a child had been characterized by a minimalist utilitarianism, and before his arrival in Tokyo-3, he never imagined that anyone in their right minds could condone a waste of resources purely for cosmetic purposes. Trust his father to disabuse him of his notions ...

Kariya was not physically observing this engagement. Being the heir of the House Matou, his face was known, and if Berserker were to associate with him under surveillance, it would break his valuable anonymity. They'd agreed that it would be best for the both of them to act independently in public. On rendezvous at the condo, Berserker was to manifest directly within - remaining astral within a rough seven hundred meter radius of the building's exterior.

This meant, of course, that if a given engagement required implements that were not Noble Phantasms - the contents of the luggage, for example - Berserker would have to physically obtain them from some secondary location away from the condo. It was a hassle, but that was the price of security.

Entering a restroom at the rear, he quickly confirmed that it was unoccupied, and moved a nearby floor-sign before the door to indicate that cleaning was in progress. Within, he opened his luggage and took out his first costume - a porter's uniform.

Regardless of his mental age, Berserker was physically around fourteen. It was pushing it to think that he could believably disguise himself as a full member of staff - but, squinting slightly as he checked his reflection in the mirror above the sinks, he felt like he could pull off the look of a youngish part-timer.

Back in the lobby, nobody seemed to notice anything strange as he commandeered a carriage for his one item of luggage. Pushing it into an elevator, he pressed the button to the ninth floor.

"Here goes nothing," he said to himself.

Kariya's proposed gamble rested on the assumption that the opponent's bounded field would fail to recognize Berserker as a Servant. Unlike members of the Assassin class, whose Presence Concealment was necessitated by the fact that they did, in fact, possess Servant presence, Berserker naturally exerted the same odic pressure on the environment as a normal human - far weaker than what a Servant ought to exhibit. Kariya had claimed during their experimentation that he couldn't detect anything at all when Berserker went astral.

Was that enough to fool the enemy's defenses, though? Berserker found his heart pounding harder as the number on the floor indicator began to approach his destination. If this failed, he would undoubtedly be attacked - and even if he managed to get away unscathed, their present plans would have to be rewritten from scratch ...

Six ...

Seven ...

Eight ...

He felt a strange sensation, similar to pushing through an Angel's AT-field. When it passed, the elevator door opened on the ninth floor anticlimactically. Relieved that no mystical forces rushed in to vivisect him, Berserker let out a sigh, and pushed the button for the thirtieth floor - a level occupied by an Italian restaurant called Ristoranto Skyline. It seemed that the mission would proceed as planned.

"Phase two," he said.

On the rooftop, Lancer blinked.

A faint, unexpected presence had just entered his Master's suite. Not a Servant. It felt human - but that was strange in and of itself. The only ones who could freely access the room were the hotel staff, and his Master had imposed a strong suggestion on the management that they were not to disturb him during the day unless there was an emergency.

Who was it, then?

Astralizing, he sank through ceiling. The sitting room was undisturbed, but the entrance to his Master's sleeping quarters had been opened, and at this short of a distance, he could sense a faint killing intent.

Lancer materialized through the door post haste, summoning his spears - but it was a moment too late. The double prongs of the intruder's lance had sunken through his Master's hand - right through the Command Seals. Kayneth Archibald El-Melloi gave off a pained scream, and Lancer felt their connection simply cut off. Furious, he fixed the enemy with a piercing glare, engraving its appearance within his mind - the skintight black gear; the blooded crimson lance; and the bone-white skull mask. His Grail-granted knowledge supplied a name, and he understood precisely how this filthy creature dared to sully the War with such underhanded tactics.

"Assassin," he spat. "I should've known."

End Snippet.
Draft: Nov 11th 2011