(Tower of Avalon, Shining Blue Galaxy)
"Fou."
"Hmm, what is it?" A Magus of Flowers looked over to see what her animal companion was watching. "Oh, it's Chaldea's Merlin promoting Chaldea again. Is this what they call a rebound?"
"Fou...?"
"Unfortunately, it isn't possible for you to go to Chaldea as you are already there. Well maybe there will be an open spot elsewhere, I suppose you could take a brief trip before- ah, I better not say too much about those things."
"Fou~"
The beast's small eyes bored into the succubus, who laughed awkwardly and tried to distract her 'pet' away from the forbidden topic. "The stream is about to start, isn't it? Let's watch it together."
(Tower of Avalon Recording Studio)
"Hello everybody watching via Fatebook's new streaming feature, it's Military (explosion) Merlin here continuing our first series on Singularities - `State of Emergency' with the Chaldea Security Organization. As usual, Fatebook doesn't find this ad-friendly even though the Chaldeans are literally fighting for the Human Order but anyway..."
The Magus of Flowers gestured to a holographic (illusion magecraft-made) topographic map denoting the main Washington-Bladensburg axis, and the camera switched to a more downward-looking angle.
"As you can see, between Washington here on the west side, and Bladensburg on the east side, the main deployments have solidified along this north-south line of contact." Merlin added a number of blue American icons and pink Celtic ones to demonstrate troop locations. "The Celts have for now ceased attempts to outflank the Americans by extending the line of contact on the latter's north and south extremities because as you can see, their supply lines from the main port were getting too long, and the Americans had both easy interior lines and a head-start in the fortification game."
The Caster pointed out a series of small castle icons within Celtic territory. "As some of you have commented before, these forts are not particularly valuable strategically. We can confirm that the Celts both took the forts with minimal losses and didn't bother to man them in depth. Remember that the artillery of this era doesn't have very much reach, as far as the scale of this map."
A series of small explosion icons now appeared over the port of Bladensburg. "Ah, but speaking of reach. In an interesting twist, the Chaldeans have started long-range bombardment of the main Celtic logistical port hub. The Celts don't seem to have a good answer to this particular tactic, but doubtless they are undertaking some adaptations in response..."
(Bladensburg Outskirts, Queen Bunker)
"Nightingale would have spotted this pattern faster," Medb grumbled when said pattern finally made itself clear to her. The Chaldeans had been attacking from various angles to complicate matters for the Celts, but when all the lines of attack were laid out on a map, the rays converging on Bladensburg also intersected Washington's main north-south roadway at evenly-spaced intervals.
"And by the looks of it, the middle would roughly be somewhere here? A little north of Washington?" Bazette looked at the map from the Washington side, which made understanding the Chaldeans' actions much easier. "So their Servants have ranged in from these specific points."
"In a way, yes." The Caster Cú had encountered a version of one of the Servants carrying out the attacks, which matched pretty closely to his memories. "I think they used the Archer's ability to shoot, and then the other one simply followed after seeing the first one's attack path. At least that's what happened in the Singularity where Boudica was fighting the Romans."
"I do feel a little disgruntled at the fact someone is shooting copies of my (Caladbolg) at us," Fergus raised an eyebrow. Not long after the first long-distance attacks started targeting their logistical hub, it became obvious to the Celt that the leading "arrow" was an explosive Broken Phantasm version of his own Noble Phantasm.
"It's almost guaranteed to be some version of Chloe; she's known to be working with Chaldea. Though of course about your sword, I think she learned that trick from her husband. But he's definitely not in Chaldea, so you probably won't get to beat him up over it." Bazette of course didn't mention how she knew this particular piece of information. But then again she knew that Caster Cú had worked alongside one of those Chloes on Chaldea's side in the Fuyuki proto-Singularity at the kickoff of the Incineration, and he hadn't brought that up either.
"So, you're all guessing their base of operations is there?" Sétanta asked in his straightforward manner pointing at the forested area that was in between two of the guessed Chaldean firing positions.
"That makes things simple, then." Cú Alter waved a hand with an irritated air. "Just go down their throat."
"At least they seem to be committed to defending Washington," the Lancer Cú remarked. "That would be why they aren't free-ranging across the countryside like we had expected before, yeah?"
"That makes the most sense," Medb mumbled in response while formulating her plan. "Alright, I think we'll start by having some troops resume pushing along the north and south corners."
"But we can't actually gain an advantage doing that," Fergus pointed out.
"That's probably true, but besides the point. Some light troops moving quickly around will force the separatists to face some uncertainty rather than have us (conveniently for them) only to the front. But it'll have to be some of the more independent units that can self-sustain for a while."
"Trying to draw out the Chaldeans again?" Bazette sounded skeptical about this approach.
"More like shaking the tree to see what falls out," Sétanta shrugged. "Whoever is in Washington won't show themselves unless there's a crisis at hand."
"This is because those cannons were useless," Cú Alter seemed more upset by that failure than Medb was, even if it was her plan.
"I had expected them to prepare for a more conventional defense setup, but it isn't as though the humans are the issue here. And the cannons have another use."
"It's too much to hope that they would conveniently split up," Bazette thought aloud, still focused on the Chaldeans' possible moves. "But if they picked a flank and moved to support it, we could get to their base before they could respond..."
"Simple enough," Fergus agreed. "And if you have the men swing out really wide -" he pointed this out on the map, making sure to give the American positions a wide berth, "then if the units sent out for this manage to get in pretty deep it will really encourage the enemy to do something. If not, well I suppose we can make trouble for them..."
"Like burning fields," Cú Alter rumbled.
"A bit rough, but that's war eh?" Lancer Cú was not particularly interested in the planning work. "But whatever their response, we'll essentially be going straight in, won't we?"
"I would say so, yes." Medb had already gone through the various scenarios mentally, and considered maintaining as short as possible a logistics line for her Braves to be a key priority. "Caster, have your druids finished work on those wagons you were in charge of?"
"Yes. We should have plenty of the new and improved 'Concentrated Mana Potion' on tap," Caster Cú replied confidently.
"Great, this will let us counter the Chaldeans' advantage of Command Spells." Bazette sounded less sure if that would be enough to clinch victory.
"So, what sort of timeline are we thinking about for this move?" Fergus asked finally. "We ourselves are not directly at risk here, but it's still troublesome to have things exploding every few hours."
"I'd give it about two days for the soldiers to make trouble on the enemy flanks," Medb explained the plan. "At that point, the Chaldeans will have had their chance for a quick response or deciding they won't; in the first case we have the advantage if we go in fast, and in the second we avoid wasting time. Conventional messengers can't keep up with Servants moving swiftly, but that works both ways."
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(Two days later)
(Chaldean Leyline Camp, near Washington)
"The reported Celtic incursions are here and here," the rider quickly pointed out the locations of Medb's new advances on the map (which had been given to the Chaldeans by the Dictator). "There's no sign or intelligence of Braves, though."
"They're going to assault Washington directly," Gudao concluded after some thought. "It's the most likely option, I'd say. Anyone?"
"After our last battle, it seems safe to say they might have reached the same conclusion we did; if they had their full forces on the field we wouldn't be able to stop them," Gudako frowned.
"That wouldn't be so clear to them, I think?" d'Eon quickly counted the Servants on each side. "They had five plus three, but lost one - that makes seven. They might expect we're down one from six, but Chloe's work would tip them off that we've replaced Artoria. Add to that an unknown Servant in Washington and Medb might see seven on each side. I wouldn't say it's comparable to our disadvantage right at the end of the previous battle."
"Then them breaking off then was a pretty bad move, then?" Jeanne raised an eyebrow. "Or am I missing something else? It wasn't that they really decided to go all-in fighting off one magical girl."
"That would be absurd," Sasaku grinned wryly. "It would probably be due to realizing they didn't have a good counter to Command Spells. After all, they saw Artoria use her Noble Phantasm at high power twice in quick succession."
"If it's a matter of exchanging Noble Phantasms, then..." Gudako looked over at her partner.
"Two," Gudao confirmed for her.
"Two," Sasaku nodded as well.
"Ok, so that means our pool is not just six Servants, but six wild card Command Spells," Gudako concluded. "If they're familiar with the system around Masters, they might have guessed we would have, heh, six to start with. Between the two of us, of course."
(Frontline dugout, Celtic side)
"... and those are our orders from Her Majesty," the officer concluded the evening's briefing.
"So we're just going over the top, then?" one of the sergeants in attendance asked. "We could've done that long ago."
"Rumor has it that the irregulars were given some special orders a little while back. In any case, these are ours."
"That's a lot of prep work just to seize one layer of the enemy's defenses. Like that we'd take a decade to get into Washington," an artillerist noted. "And why were we digging in all these heavy cannons, only to go in with knives?"
A couple of those in the know had their own thoughts about the possibility of being countered by the Chaldeans but said nothing. It was pretty obvious that whichever section of the line those warriors chose to take on would immediately lose its assaulting units in a rebels' Servant-aided counterattack, unless, as ordered, the attackers immediately dug into the trenches they had just taken. Even so, only their emplaced cannons would really be effective against hostile Brave-tier opponents, which meant anyone who was positioned out in front of said cannons would probably be selling their lives to buy time for that precious artillery firepower to get to work.
"Just make sure you have those cannons ready as ordered," the officer eyed the gunner. "It was for exactly this that Her Majesty had the druids craft all that special grapeshot."
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Notes:
Yes, just like other people can vocalize emoticons, or heart- or star-icons, so too with explosion icons. Military-Merlin is his next gig after (if you recall) Blue Galaxy Merlin sued him over using the Magi-Mari IP. Of course the shortened version would be Miri-Mari. If you're on the Throne of Heroes you can probably watch all of Merlin's social media output 'live' but if you got summoned somewhere that the content would inform you about future events, you would probably forget it all due to self-consistency being in force when you're directly participating within a branch. Especially if you watched episodes that were literally about actions you will (in the future) be involved in.
That said, there's presumably some sort of ordering within timelines, so that it's possible for branch B to learn about what happened in year 2030 in branch A, but not about year 2030 in branch B itself. The issue with self-consistency and too much cross-branch information transfer is you "should not" have something where you indirectly learned about your own future by learning about it from branch C (if that was allowed knowledge somehow)... so you can learn about the future of anyone "ahead" of you, but not anyone "behind" you. This doesn't apply at all to the Void Support Group obviously.
It's an open question how much self-consistency applies within the Separation Order, since Chaldea avoided being Incinerated along with Human History (so currently they presumably don't actually have a history). And I know we've established here that Kiyohime can text chat with 2030 Mooncell Tamamo (2030 Mooncell is not the Grand Aria's future timeline), or read Fatebook posts (see the above bit about that stuff). And some people like Tamamo Cat seem able to discuss your actual future with no issues, though this is generally because she's like an oracle (very vague) and always conveniently avoids creating paradoxes. Sasaku talks with Cat a lot because of this, but there's also that element of self-fulfilling prophecy if she follows what seems like a future being described by Cat. Self-consistency in this story doesn't have the equivalent of a Counter Force (unless maybe you count Chaldea with Singularities) and the World System will just delete your branch if there are "too many" paradoxes is roughly how it goes.