Solenoid Flux
An Evangelion / Fate Zero Crossover
Snippet #7: Casses Circumdant II / This Present Illusion
Miyama Commercial District, 09:15 PM
The church was in a quiet residential neighborhood, about ten blocks west of the commercial district in central Miyama - too far from the leylines for Lord El-Melloi's wraith familiars to serve as Lancer's reinforcements. To the Servant, however, it wasn't a significant strategic loss; the strength of low-level familiars was immaterial, and had little place in a proper engagement between Servants. If Assassin had caught wind of the evening's offensive at all, it was doubtful that the wraiths could've made much of a difference in the first place.
The buildings and surrounding grounds were secured by a bounded field of modest strength, well-enough designed that Lancer would've been hard pressed to detect it were he not a spirit. To his senses, the protection had the same character to it as the defensive provisions his Master had enacted at the hotel - permitting non-magi uninvolved in the War to go about their business unhindered, but blocking entrance to humans and entities of potentially threatening odic pressure. Though from lack of proximity to a leyline, the strength of the barrier here was of a far lower magnitude, its surface might have well been wrought of iron, surmountable to a typical Servant - manifest or demanifest - only through an exercise of uncommon force.
Lancer, however, was not a typical Servant. He was the bearer of the mystical spear, Gae Dearg - the Crimson Rose of Exorcism.
Despite its appellation, the effect of Lancer's Noble Phantasm was not to perfectly dispel or purge magecraft. The essences that Manannan mac Lir had imbued within the red spear permitted its blade to disrupt the flows of thaumaturgical energy, temporarily interfering with phenomenon unnaturally produced. A projection of an ongoing magecraft so disrupted would inevitably begin to reassert itself upon the passing of the blade, but rate of reassertion was subject to provision of fuel. So distant from the leylines, a long slash across the church's defenses would not regenerate for at least a second.
Lancer did not require the whole of a second to clear the barrier. The telltale odic leakage of Assassin's Master - obscured originally by the effect of the bounded field - was laid bare the moment Lancer set foot within, placing the magus within the lighted central edifice before an audience of human non-magi. Hostages? No. By the suggestion of the Grail, it was more likely a routine religious congregation; and the justification for the orientation of the bounded field. If the non-magi were stayed by some form of suggestion, the atmosphere within would've been detectably wrong.
Lord El-Melloi had made clear early on that the War was to be fought in secrecy from non-magi wherever possible, and that this was a rule and tradition of utmost importance. Under normal circumstances, Lancer would be inclined to agree; for in the heat of combat, even warriors of nigh-legendary skill would be hard put to absolutely ensure the safety of innocents en masse. However, though Assassin had yet to arrive or manifest in defense of his Master, Lancer had realistically only a small window of time to complete his task. He was needed at Lord El-Melloi's side - especially now that he could no longer be summoned via command seal.
Astralizing, Lancer entered the building through a stained glass window. The enemy master, apparently unaware of Lancer's arrival, lowly continued his solemn sermon - right up until Lancer materialized before his pulpit and rammed the Gae Buidhe through his throat.
The folk of the congregation were momentarily silent in shock, but at the frightened shriek of a small girl, they erupted into pandemonium. Withdrawing his spear from the enemy's corpse, Lancer prepared to immediately demanifest - but something about the bounded field had just changed drastically.
"I ... I can't astralize?" he asked himself, staring at the solid flesh of his hand.
In his disorientation, Lancer felt something sharp and thin pierce his lower back, right as Assassin's presence made itself known. He turned his head and found himself meeting the gaze of a smiling old woman, who had planted some medical apparatus - a syringe, his mind supplied - into his flesh.
The flock that had attended the sermon were no longer panicking. Instead, they silently looked upon Lancer with unsettling, identical grins - and on the floor beside the pulpit, the corpse of the enemy Master had become that of masked skeletal man clad in black, skin-tight garb.
Lancer had been unconsciously biased to the expectation that the enemy Servant would directly engage him as he had in the hotel - in part because he'd already done so, and in part because Lancer's own areas of specialization were so oriented. Assassin, however, did not by nature favor melee combat. In hindsight, it should've been obvious that a man like Hassan-i Sabbah would respond to known threats by setting the stage for ambush and assassination.
Presence Concealment, the Servant of the Lance belatedly realized, was a misleading name for Assassin's class ability. More accurately, it could be described as the flawless falsification of odic pressure gradients ...
Shinto Slums, 09:15 PM
The capacity to differentiate magi from mundanes by odic pressure was a feature fundamental of bounded fields. It was with this in mind that on noticing the changethat had come upon the leylines, Emiya Kiritsugu forcibly deactivated all of his prana circuits.
His assistant, Hisau Maiya, wasn't able to do the same in time. With a delay of a few seconds, half a dozen wraiths manifested in the air, sniffing out her incompletely-suppressed thaumaturgical presence like spectral bloodhounds.
The deathly creatures were invisible to most humans without active reinforcement of sight, but to the eyes of Emiya Kiritsugu - which had been rendered low-functioning Jougan through alchemical surgery - they had the appearance of rotting human corpses, somehow comprised of blue light. Maiya, whose eyes were unmodified, could sense them only by presence, and barely dodged aside as one of them clumsily swiped at the wall she'd been hiding behind - breaking through the bricks with ease, and scattering debris across the rooftop.
Physical interference, thought Kiritsugu.
Of the participating Masters thus far known to the Einzberns, only one possessed sufficient skill in the relevant disciplines to employ familiars of this specific type and quality: Kayneth Archibald El-Melloi.
Twelve years ago, Kiritsugu had dispatched a cabal of necromancers who made a practice of binding and preserving the spirits of human sacrifices as highly functional familiars - beings known as Ghost Liners, who were similar but nonequivalent to Servants. These wraiths, incapable of independent magecraft, were nowhere near the same level of threat, but the principles behind their instrumentation were virtually identical. El-Melloi had bound the souls of countless dead to the domain of his 'leyline field,' enhancing their combat utility with some Wind-Elemental technique that granted them capacity for electromagnetic interference. Their surfaces were coated with force fields, in other words, lending them apparent kinetic solidity.
There were only six of the creatures here. If Kiritsugu and Maiya had been prepared for combat against Servants or spirits in general, they might have had a chance. Instead, they'd only lightly armed themselves for maximum mobility, intending to take out the human Masters of the War by conventional gunfire. As it was, the only weapon they currently possessed that could substantially harm the wraiths was Kiritsugu's Mystic Code - the Thompson Contender. The closest weapons cache they'd stocked with other anti-spiritual equipment was fifteen minutes away, outside of the slums.
Kiritsugu didn't have the time to deal with this. Not with Irisviel traveling unprotected; and certainly not with Berserker's sudden manifestation nearby.
Initiating the reactivation of his prana circuits, he softly intoned, "Time Alter - Double Accel," and pulled his Mystic Code from its holster as the world slowed.
Making more time was Emiya Kiritsugu's specialty.
Shinto Slums, 09:15 PM
Irisviel stopped the car in a wide street at the center of the slums, and disembarked along with her Servant. The vehicle, a blue Honda Saber by some odd turn of her husband's wit, had been parked near the beachfront district prior to the opening of the War - one of eight luxury sedans situated around the city for her convenience of transportation.
Stepping into the high-beams, Irisviel studied their opponents.
The white-haired enemy Master, Matou Kariya, little resembled the photograph that Kiritsugu had shown her not long ago. The disfigurement of his sweating, haggard face felt thaumaturgical in origin, and he seemed physically taxed - probably unused to supporting the heavy pranic demands of the War. Beside him stood his Servant, who was clad in a full suit of plate armor, and enshrouded in dark mist. There was nothing elegant or knightly about the figure, and to Irisviel, its hunched posture was more suggestive of a lower primate than a human. The intense, chaotic presence it exuded indicated that it was none other than Berserker.
"Be careful, Saber," she said.
Without taking her gaze off the enemy, the tiny, blond knight nodded seriously. The black three-piece suit she wore was replaced by her customary armored dress a moment later, and she instantly readied her weapon - a blade rendered invisible by the Boundary of the Wind King.
Kariya couldn't help but smile, despite his pain; his patience had paid off. More softly than Saber and Irisviel could hear over their vehicle's engine, he said to himself, "You better all be watching this, you bastards ..."
Fuyuki Grand Hyatt, 09:15 PM
It was almost like a dance.
Humans, Kayneth Archibald El-Melloi had thought, could not move like this; could not avoid the coordinated, high-speed kinetic attacks of his swarm of familiars. He'd personally designed and revised the threat response algorithms multiple times to ensure it. Within the vicinity of the rooftop, there were eighty-four wraiths, and with their magnetic shells fully actualized, they could each move at around thirty kilometers an hour. Evasion should've been impossible.
Tohsaka Tokiomi was performing it casually, as if it were merely a light warm-up exercise. Infuriatingly, he wasn't even moving very quickly - just at the minimal speed required to cleanly avoid each attack. Kayneth supposed that he was reading the familiars' attacks somehow, but short of analyzing and interpreting the spellwork in real-time, he couldn't see a theoretical means to do so - much less a practical one.
"Did you know," said the Asian man, sidestepping an incoming wraith without breaking stance, "that I was born with a mere eighteen prana circuits? Not of very high-quality, either. My daughters far surpass me innate talent."
Kayneth stared. Was this some obscure Oriental humor? Tohsaka's claim was belied by the very fact that he wasn't yet deceased; and it took an uncommon sort to raise his hand against the genius of Clock Tower and survive unharmed. Every passing moment, Tohsaka's slow advance across the rooftop grew more improbable, and Kayneth could feel a distinct growth in the magnitude of his odic pressure. It was almost as if the man's entire body had become one circuit of unreasonably high quality.
"There is a limit to the amount of provocation that I shall tolerate from you without reprise, Tohsaka," Kayneth snarled, removing a stoppered glass tube from the inner pocket his cassock. "You would dare claim to be a third-rate magus? That a mere peasant could avoid being crushed by my familiars!"
Tohsaka laughed congenially.
"No, not at all," he replied, weaving his way past another barrage of attacks. He was now only five meters away. "I'm merely indicating that within the context of Occidental thaumaturgy, my talents and skills would rank me as little more than a third-rate magus."
So saying, the man clapped his hands together, and Kayneth felt a wave of prana cross his body. It was too simple in structure to be described as an act of magecraft, and he could detect no discernible effect within his flesh - but across the helipad, more than forty of his familiars were instantly annihilated. This wasn't a typical act of purification or exorcism. The structures of the wraiths were dissolved - reduced to their component prana and dissipated purely by Tohsaka's force of presence. The remnant energies of the force fields that had given the creatures solidity crackled in the air.
"There is, however, more to the world than Occidental magecraft," said Tohsaka, amused at Kayneth's expression of incomprehension. "If you're willing to dedicate the time, the study of the traditions of the Orient is most rewarding."
Unbelievably, it seemed as if Tohsaka had nothing to fear from the wraiths; but Kayneth was a man who had never known failure, and he was not so easily put off. Not bothering to unstopper his glass tube, Kayneth angrily smashed it against the pavement. The metallic droplets of his Mystic Code settled briefly in separate beads for a moment before rejoining, growing in external volume until it was the rough size of an attack hound.
"Fervor, mei sanguis," Kayneth intoned. "Automatoportum defensio; automatoportum quaerere; dilectus incursio."
As his weapon readied itself, Kayneth glared at Tohsaka, daring him to make a move. The Volumen Hydragyrum was not so fragile that it could be eliminated with the sort of parlor trick that had destroyed his familiars. However, the Asian man's damnable smile exhibited not a trace of anxiety.
"Ire sanctio!" Kayneth shouted.
At nearly the speed of sound, the mercury sphere shot out a whip-like tendril, sharpened with an edge of diamond-like consistency maybe several molecules across. The cement blocks that Kayneth had tested the technique upon frequently appeared to remain intact for seconds after being bisected; and at the moment, he no greater desire than to see Tohsaka Tokiomi surprised at the fact of his own beheading. There was no avoiding the slash; no human had the response time to do so without magecraft, and the Japanese magus wasn't using any discernible reinforcement.
Or so Kayneth presumed.
Rather than meeting its target, the bladed tendril struck the gem of a ring on Tohsaka's right hand - and simply stopped rigid. From the point of contact, blue crystal began to spread across the rest of the Volumen Hydragyrum, rapidly enveloping the mercury in a solid block of translucent azure - and leeching away at the prana invested within.
"The Oriental methodology of Breathing and Walking was conceived of as a path by which to reach and interact with the Void at the root of existence," explained Tohsaka, pacing past the frozen Mystic Code. "However, such a feat might require multiple lifespans to attain. It's far easier to connect with existences that actively seek out temporary vessels to inhabit. Counter Forces, for example. I refer to my technique as Musou Tensei - the Phantasmal Metempsychosis. It's a perfect counter to any strong thaumaturgy that distorts the world."
Not of his own accord, Kayneth backed away. His heart was pounding audibly.
"I intended no insult in confronting you myself, Lord El-Melloi," continued Tohsaka, stopping right as he violated Kayneth's personal space. "You see, Archer is loathe to waste his time fighting those who fail to qualify as Heroic Spirits. It's really just as well, because I haven't come here as a Master seeking to defeat you. I'm here in my official capacity as the Administrator of the Land of Fuyuki - and you, my Lord, no longer bear the Command Seals that mark you as a participant of the Grail War. I have no choice but to recognize you as an interloper."
For the first time that Kayneth could remember, he was beset by a weakness in his legs, and found himself collapsing to pavement.
"Are you familiar with Spaghetti Westerns, my lord? I saw a number of them when I was studying in Italy. Quite enjoyable." Tohsaka Tokiomi leaned toward him, hands folded behind his back. "But a common plot device within them is applicable here."
"Wh- What are you saying?" asked Kayneth, confused by the non-sequitur.
"Surrender your Crest to the House of Tohsaka and leave this place alive," replied the Asian man, "or refuse, and I send you to meet your maker. It's your choice."
End Snippet.
Draft: Nov 21st 2011