Characters / Fate/stay night: Servants

This is a page about the Heroic Spirits appearing in the Visual Novel turned Anime Fate/stay night

• For the human characters in the story, go here.
• For their appearances in Fate/hollow ataraxia, go here.
• For their appearances in Fate/Zero and other Servants exclusive to the fourth war, go here.

Warning! As Servant identities are quite strongly tied to most of the characteristics of Servants, everything relating to a character's specific identity will be left unmarked. All other spoilers, such as for the story or Fate-specific character details, will be marked as necessary.

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Character-Specific Pages

• Saber
• Archer (major unmarked story spoilers)
• Archer 2 (major unmarked story spoilers)

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General

• Achilles' Heel: Even the most powerful Servants require a Master to provide them with mana and serve as their anchor. Their abilities nosedive as soon as they lose their mana source, and they'll fade away soon after if they don't find a replacement Master. This makes targeting Masters a more appealing option than trying to beat someone like say, Heracles in a fight.
• All Myths Are True: Almost all myths are true, albeit with various historical and mythological liberties being taken. The Grail system is set up so that heroes who were ordinary humans in-life are bestowed superhuman abilities based on the myths and legends that center around them and the Servant class they are summoned into; mythological figures who may not have actually existed in-universe — like Heracles and Medusa — can still be manifested as Servants; and in the case of beings that are genuinely fictitious, the Grail summons the Heroic Spirit that best qualifies, as seen with Sasaki Kojirō and Aŋra Mainiiu.
• Army of The Ages: The Heroic Spirits can be summoned from any time period, even the future, as long as someone has an appropriate catalyst. It's worth noting that most tend to predate the "modern" world, however, and any actual ones from the future, especially powerful ones, would be rare and special. Archer is an example of the sort of circumstances a modern person has to go through to become a Heroic Spirit, or an existence similar to one.
• Artistic License: Word of God establishes that not everything that recorded history and mythology say about the Heroic Spirits' backgrounds is (completely) true, and some parts of their legends may have even been lost to time, forgotten by future generations. That's why Cú Chulainn has blue hair and red eyes, Heracles is a nine-foot-tall monster, and many other liberties are taken with the legends of mythological heroes. There's also the fact that the Nasuverse is different from our own, so history is fair game.
• Brought Down to Badass: While some Servants obtain supernatural powers based on the legends surrounding them and the class they are summoned into, others — like Saber and Berserker — end up being much less powerful than they were even in-life due to their arsenals being restricted by their Servant class and/or incompatible Masters, though they are still enormously powerful supernatural warriors.
• Calling Your Attacks: When a Servant uses what's usually their most powerful weapon or distinctive skill — their "Noble Phantasm" — they shout its name. All Noble Phantasms must be called out to be used. This is explained as being required to unlock their power in the Holy Grail War system.
• Character Alignment: All Servants possess canonical alignments in their status pages. These tend to be points of contention among the fandom, particularly Gilgamesh's. It's worth noting, though, that they're from the perspective of their respective time period of their legends, so Deliberate Values Dissonance is in full play here.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: All Mythological Heroes Are Real... if their legend is popular enough. The more well-known heroes are in the time they are summoned, the more powerful they are. Though there are exceptions, as Gilgamesh, protagonist of the world's oldest surviving piece of literature, is the greatest Heroic Spirit despite being relatively obscure. Furthermore, historical aspects of a Heroic Spirit — provided they previously existed as mortals — can be overwritten by their legends, granting them access to abilities they never possessed in-life.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The typical result of a human fighting one, as even the weakest Servant is more than a match for the strongest human on a physical level. That's not to say a human can't win, however.
• Effective Knockoff: The Servants seen in story actually a mix between this and Shoddy Knockoff Product. Even with an artifact as powerful as the Holy Grail, only the World has the Authority and power to summon the actual Heroic Spirits (in forms like the Grand Servants or Counter Guardians) who are much more powerful than the ones seen in story because they are summoned by the World itself. The Fuyuki Holy Grail summoning system is a vastly inferior version of the one the World uses to summon the seven Grand Servants which summons a copy of the Heroic Spirit and shoves them into a much smaller non-Grand Class vessel that constrains their abilities. What keeps them from being a full blown Shoddy Knockoff Product is that even weakened as they are, they're still much more powerful than humans and they aren't meant to fight at all.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Justified. The Servants are usually only addressed by their Class. Knowing a Servant's real name may give a clue to their weaknesses, so their names are kept secret where possible. Also, out of formality, most Servants refer to their Masters simply as "Master," but Archer and Saber go against common practice and refer to their Masters by first name.
• Fighting a Shadow: With the exceptions of Saber and Archer, Servants are mere copies of the Heroic Spirits contained in the Throne of Heroes. This means that even if a Servant is slain, they can be summoned again in a subsequent Grail War. Due to only being copies of the original Heroic Spirit, however, they will not retain memories of prior summonings.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Averted. Even though Servants came from various ages, when summoned they will automatically gain general knowledge about the era they are summoned in.
• Humanoid Abomination: Servants aren't just resurrected spirits, they're copies of "heroes" with such famous accomplishments that they were imprinted upon humanity's collective subconscious and were removed from the normal cycle of death and rebirth ("heroes" is in quotes because several only qualify for the title in horrifying, obtuse ways, as seen with Aŋra Mainiiu). It is stated over and over again throughout the visual novel that they are existences beyond what a human is capable of equaling or understanding. This can be best seen in the Heaven's Feel route when Shirou gets Archer's arm transplanted onto his body. Not only does he only survive due to the constant presence of a holy shroud protecting him, but it converts his living flesh into thousands of overlapping swords, and accessing its memories threatens to destroy his mind. In some Bad Ends, it outright kills him.
• Human Resources: Servants can recover magical energy by draining the mana of humans. Depending on how much they drain, the process is either highly draining or outright fatal to the human in question. Most Servants who lack Masters capable of granting them magical energy do this often.
• Human Sacrifice: This is their real purpose. The Greater Grail was designed to open a gate to the Root by using the souls of all seven Heroic Spirits collected by the Lesser Grail as fuel. Ideally, all the Masters were to use their Command Seals to compel their Servants into suicide upon summoning and then begin the ritual. However, only the Three Founding Families and their overseer Zelretch know the truth in order to maximize their own chances of reaching the Root. The Holy Grail War was the guise of a wish-granting ritual cooked up as an excuse to draw in potential Masters to summon the sacrifices, trick the Heroic Spirits into letting themselves be summoned, and to hide the Three Families' true goals from other mages who would likely steal the Grail away if they knew the truth. In Fate/Apocrypha, the truth does get out and the Grail is subsequently stolen away, ending the Three Families' ambitions.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Servants can have their Noble Phantasm appear out of thin air. Justified by the Holy Grail War system.
• Lightning Bruiser: All Servants possess senses, strength, speed, and durability vastly outstripping what normal humans are capable of. Servants can be fought and defeated by Magi or magically-augmented weapons, but in general it takes another Servant to defeat a Servant.
• Mons: The Servants are a humanoid version. A Master can order his Servant around, can make a contract with more than one, and a Servant can continue in the Grail War if they make another contract with a new Master.
• Mundane Utility: The Throne of Heroes is a collective of powerful historical and mythological champions who are meant to be used as agents or familiars in service of protecting mankind. Here, the architects of the Fuyuki Holy Grail War intended for them to be used as little more than supercharged human sacrifices.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Servants, even in material form, can't be harmed by weapons without spiritual or conceptual enchantments. Some have more defenses in addition to this.
• No Ontological Inertia: Averted: Servants cease to exist if they stop getting mana from, or lose their contract with, their Masters. However, disappearing generally takes a few hours. In that few-hour window the Servant can save themselves if they can find a Magus to form a new contract. There are Servants with Independent Action (mostly a class skill of the Archer class, though Rider has it as a non-class one), who can survive longer; the second Archer with a Rank A can last for a whole week (indefinitely due to the Grail mud giving him physical body), Archer, with Rank B, can last for three days without a contract, while Rider, with Rank C, can last for one day.
• Older Is Better: The closer the hero lived to the beginning of history, the more mystery is built around them, making them more powerful by extension. This makes characters like Archer 2, Berserker and Fate/Apocrypha's Karna freakishly overpowered. Heroes from the Bronze Age and before that lived in an age where gods frolicked among man and world-ending threats were a dime a dozen, and can do things that are Beyond the Impossible even for more modern great heroes.
• One-Man Army: Any Servant with the appropriately named Anti-Army Noble Phantasms, or above, is a Person of Mass Destruction capable of wiping out entire armies in a single attack. Even Servants with lower classifications are still more than a match for regular humans.
• Our Spirits Are Different: In the Nasuverse, most Heroic Spirits are the souls of heroes who achieved great renown in life and were sublimated into the Throne of Heroes upon death, cut off from space and time. Servants are copies of these entities created by the Holy Grail, and can switch from material and immaterial forms at will. However, Saber can't enter immaterial form due to Shirou's improper summoning. Although this turns out to be untrue, this is because the Holy Grail regards Artoria as a human rather than a spirit.
• Paradox Person: Heroic Spirits are unmoored from the time-space continuum, and thus even Heroic Spirits from the future be summoned in the past — even interacting with their past mortal selves. Saber points out that this renders Archer's attempt to Ret-Gone himself by killing Shirou pointless, since as a Heroic Spirit he's unaffected by causality.
• Popularity Power: A Servant's power is often influenced by their popularity and impact on history. This is how Vlad III and Nikola Tesla became powerful Servants, despite their relatively recent conception.
• Psychic Link: Servants and Masters have the ability to see parts of each others' lives when they sleep, especially when they have a strong connection.
• Public Domain Character: Servants are heroes from myths and legends, making it possible for Nasu to take certain liberties with their stories and portrayals.
• Pure Magic Being: Despite their appearances, Servants are spiritual beings and true incarnation is outside of their abilities. This makes them collectible by the Lesser Grail who breaks them down into component mana as fuel for the wish granting process or the Greater Grail's true purpose.
• Random Power Ranking: All Servant abilities such as Strength or their Noble Phantasm get a score ranging from E to A to EX, but the actual bearing on how effective they are in this area is rather vague and occasionally seem to contradict what we are shown, even varying based on what Class they're summoned into and who their Master is.
• Rank Inflation: We've got A...and A+...and A++...and then A+++...also EX... It's explained that the E through A ranks are where a skill or stat rates as a quantifiable amount, with EX meaning "unquantifiable for various reasons, sometimes due to power", and plus marks indicating situational increases in rank. Rarely, minus marks on a rank are seen, and though those haven't been explicitly explained, it stands to reason that they're the opposite of plus marks. Which means that the rank can decrease in certain situations.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: The Servants all have stats such as endurance, strength, magic resistance, special abilities and Character Alignment, despite the fact that the visual novel is text-based and you can only make story choices. According to Rin, how these values are displayed in the book she loaned Shirou that displays these stats vary from person to person in appearance, but since Shirou is all but an outright Muggle, he sees it as this. Nasu is MASSIVE Dungeons and Dragons nerd, which might also have something to with it.
• Too Awesome to Use: Servants can overload their Noble Phantasms with mana to create an even more powerful version called a Broken Phantasm. The catch is as the name implies, they can use it only once then it breaks, never to come back again. Better hope they're great at fighting with their fists. Archer can keep making Noble Phantasms as long as he has mana, so he can abuse Broken Phantasms in a way that no other Servant can.
• Vampiric Draining: One of the ways a Servant can obtain power and restore their mana is by draining people's life forces, usually in the form of blood (though semen is apparently a very viable substitute). Most of the heroes summoned as Servants don't approve of this method.
• You Don't Look Like You: A minor plot point is that Servants like Altria and Iskander don't look like what history says they did, though some Servants' appearances can also be altered by their myths and Class.

Lancer

Voiced by: Nobutoshi Canna (JP), Tony Oliver (EN)

"Stooping to dirty tricks is a mage's role. My kind just fights where and when we're told."

"It should be natural for you to drink until dawn with someone you get along with, even if he may be your enemy."

Lancer is a carefree, laidback Servant always eager to get into a good fight, and will never back down unless commanded. When not being an enemy, he shows a playful attitude and loves to tease. He is most often seen fighting Archer throughout the whole story. Although easy to dismiss as being a mediocre Servant, he is in fact extremely fast and skilled in the use of the lance.

His identity is revealed early on as one of the greater heroes of Irish Mythology, Cu Chulainn. Thus, his Noble Phantasm is easily guessable: The Gae Bolg, which kills its target instantly by automatically piercing the victim's heart and then reversing cause-and-effect to create a reason for it.

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• Adaptational Badass: In the original visual novel's Heaven's Feel route, Lancer is killed by True Assassin in a matter of seconds while trying to escape the Shadow, while in the movie adaption, he is given an extended action scene where he chases True Assassin across the city, lands a few blows on him, and even manages to get his Gae Bolg off before finally being killed when True Assassin lures him to the shadow. It's made clear that had he either been given a second longer to activate Gae Bolg, or been fighting away from the Shadow, he would have easily killed Assassin.
• Almighty Janitor: In a sense. Despite being part of one of the top 3 classes, Lancer is required by his Master to hold back in all of his first fights. Even with this handicap, Lancer is still one of the strongest Servants in the series. He even held Gilgamesh at bay for half a day. The same Gilgamesh who utterly decimated Rider in Zero and Berserker in the Unlimited Bladeworks route.
• Always Accurate Attack: Both techniques of the Noble Phantasm Gae Bolg are this, with the single-target version twisting the laws of cause and effect to always strike the heart while the Anti-Army version moves with such a speed and covers such a wide area (by multiplying into dozens of spearheads, as seen in Fate/EXTRA, CCC and Fate/Extella when used against multiple enemies) that it is practically impossible to avoid it without teleporting. The former can be avoided with extremely good luck, however.
• Ambiguously Bi: Not in the visual novel (unless you count Gae Bolg), but in spinoff material. In Fate/unlimited codes, he calls Diarmuid beautiful, more or less due to some Deliberate Values Dissonance but he's always shown interest in women either way.
• Animal Motifs: Dogs, as per his legend. He hates being compared to a dog, and in an anime-exclusive scene from the Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel, he's represented by a toy dog in Sakura's dream.
• Anti-Villain: He's merely following orders from his mysterious Master and seems disgusted or annoyed at the more unpleasant things he has to do. In two routes he gets fed up with it and turns on Kotomine.
• Berserk Button: Comparing him to a dog is a bad idea and he also hates traitors and liars.
• Big Damn Heroes: He saves Tohsaka several times in Unlimited Blade Works.
• Blood Knight: He actually doesn't care about getting the Grail at all. He just wants to fight. Hence his frustration that he's never allowed to do so. This trait is the only thing that keeps Archer alive when Lancer is finally allowed to go all-out against him during their rematch in Unlimited Blade Works, as Archer is able to continuously bait Lancer's strikes by intentionally creating gaps in his defenses only to block them at the last second. Lancer is having too much fun to take the hint despite surpassing Archer in every way in close combat.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Especially in Unlimited Blade Works, whereas he's shown to love teasing both Rin and Saber, and he fights for the fight itself.
• Boring, but Practical: Despite being not very flashy and useless against multiple foes or fortifications, the normal use of Gae Bolg can easily One-Hit Kill Servants and uses extremely little mana. Saber states he could probably use it six or seven times for the same amount of mana that an equally decisive blow from an "A"-rank Noble Phantasm would consume, and likens it to a man who can use a single arrow to win a battle most Servants could only win with an artillery barrage.
• Born Unlucky: Luck stat E, the worst possible. It shows in-game too, considering all the messes he ends up in. It would cause him and almost all other Lancers to become Cosmic Playthings and Buttmonkies in the series.
• Breakout Character: Not as much as Saber or Archer, but he proved popular enough to appear in Fate/EXTRA, get Promoted to Playable in Fate/Extella, show up in Fate/Grand Order with three extra variations (his playstyle also helped boost his popularity), and appear as a major ally the First Order anime.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: In Heaven's Feel, he has his heart ripped out by True Assassin and is then eaten alive by the Shadow.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: His second fight with Archer in Unlimited Blade Works. Fighting to his full capabilities, Archer can only barely keep up with him and only survives since he was familiar with Lancer's style from their first fight, and even then Lancer has Archer on the defensive for most of the fight and quickly ends it with the thrown version of Gae Bolg. After Archer's Rho Aias gets destroyed as a result of barely diverting the lance, he only survives because Lancer figures out his plan and chooses not to kill him afterwards.
• Cute Little Fangs: It's most noticeable in animated adaptations. His canine teeth are more pointed than those of other characters to suit his dog motif. Apart from making his smile a little more feral than it might otherwise be, they're not at all disfiguring.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: His attitude towards killing and being a Friendly Enemy somewhat alienates the others, who are antagonistic towards him for it. In Unlimited Blade Works, he spends a lot of time messing with Tohsaka due to these values.
• Determinator: He is rarely hit so he doesn't get to show this often, but his A-ranked Battle Continuation means he can fight long after he "should" have fallen. His legend involved him fighting against an army through a series of duels, which he fought until he was mortally wounded. Then he proceeded to tie himself to a post so he could stand up to continue fighting. He continued fighting and killing people until his last breath, including killing his killer, post-mortem. His enemies didn't even believe he was dead until a bird landed on him. This trait isn't shown in two of three routes since he was One Hit Killed by his own Gae Bolg in Unlimited Blade Works and the Shadow in Heaven's Feel but it shows in the Fate route, where he fights Gilgamesh for twelve hours before being defeated. For reference, even Berserker only lasted minutes, and Gilgamesh had to use everything in his arsenal to keep Lancer from entering close combat, lest he be in actual trouble.
• The Dog Bites Back: After being forced to follow orders he considers disgusting throughout the Grail War, near the end of Unlimited Blade Works he finally gets fed up when ordered to kill Tohsaka after protecting her for a day or two and refuses to do it. Kotomine forces him to stab himself in the heart, after which he gets back up and kills Kotomine, saves Tohsaka and lights the castle on fire before dying.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: He's killed by True Assassin and the Shadow in Heaven's Feel after their battle to establish True Assassin as a threat and give some mystery to the Shadow.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: How he died in his legend. He basically dies after single-handedly holding off an entire army. And he also does this in the VN, in Fate, he holds off against Gilgamesh for twelve hours to save the heroes and in Unlimited Blade Works a mostly dead Lancer kills Kotomine, stabs Shinji, frees Tohsaka and burns down the castle they're in.
• Enemy Mine: Teams up with Shirou and Rin in Unlimited Blade Works to defeat Caster.
• Even Evil Has Standards: While technically a villain, he's disgusted by Kirei and Gilgamesh and betrays them in Fate and Unlimited Blade Works.
• Fighting Irish: He's one of Ireland's better known heroes, and he enjoys nothing more than fighting.
• Foreshadowing: Looking at all the other Master and Servant pairs, it doesn't look like he has much in common with Kirei. There's a reason for that.
• Fragile Speedster: In Fate/unlimited codes. Also has one of the longest reaches in the game.
• Friendly Enemy: He actually prefers this kind of relationship and finds it odd when people feel they have to be antagonistic towards people they might end up killing. On the flipside, this does not get in the way of his killing when he must.
• The Gadfly: Only really apparent in Unlimited Blade Works, but Lancer is shown to get a great deal of amusement from teasing girls he finds interesting. "Even Rin?", you ask? Especially Rin.
• Game Face: Usually quite easy on the eyes, but his features can be unsettlingly animalistic and feral sometimes. Which is probably a Call-Back to his legendary Warp Spasm.
• Geas: It's mentioned on the weapons page that he is under a geas to lose to a man from Ulster wielding Caladbolg. It never comes up. With reason, mind you, since neither Archer nor Gilgamesh — the former having a copy and the latter having the prototypical Caladbolg — hail from Ulster, meaning Lancer has no reason to lose to them should they use it. However, this didn't stop Gilgamesh from chaining Lancer down with the Chains of Heaven and executing him with Caladbolg in the Studio DEEN anime adaptation, seemingly using that weapon out of a sense of irony on the King of Heroes' part.
• Heel–Face Turn: Lancer starts off trying to kill Rin and mortally-wounding Shirou. Later in Fate he ultimately turns against Kotomine after learning about the existence of Gilgamesh and being disgusted by the King of Heroes himself, ultimately sacrificing his life to buy Shirou and Saber time to get away and regroup. In Unlimited Blade Works, he shows up to help Shirou and Rin defeat Caster, ostensibly on orders from his Master. He admits he enjoyed working with them, saves Rin from being raped by Shinji, and is so outraged when Kotomine orders him to kill her that he turns on him.
• Honor Before Reason: Fate/hollow ataraxia explains something that was only implied here. Namely, he made a vow that he would follow the orders of anyone he had sworn his allegiance to without question. Kind of regrets that one considering who he's working for.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Comes off as a bit of a cocky dick at first, but genuinely praises Shirou for surviving against him with nothing but a poster and is actually a pretty good guy.
• Lawful Neutral: In-Universe alignment.
• Lightning Bruiser: At his fullest, Lancer is the fastest Servant in the war, strong enough to throw his lance with enough force to dispel Archer's Rho Aias and break his arm, and is arguably even more difficult to kill than Berserker, given that he lasts exponentially longer against Gilgamesh compared to him.
• Magic Knight: As shown in Unlimited Blade Works, Lancer is capable of performing Runic Magic, and his skill is sufficient to the point where Fate/Grand Order reveals that he does qualify for the Caster class.
• Mark of the Supernatural: He has blue hair, as did his predecessor in the Fourth Grail War. Like most Nasuverse characters, his unnatural hair color seems to be a hint he's not fully human — and indeed he's not; he's a demigod, which helps in deducing his identity.
• Nice Guy: Is probably the kindest and most amicable Servant besides Saber.
• Normally, I Would Be Dead Now: Lancer has the "Battle Continuation" ability, which allows him to fight effectively even when mortally wounded. He uses it to his advantage in Unlimited Blade Works, allowing him to live for a few minutes after having had his heart pierced by his own spear.
• Older Is Better: Compared to the 4th War's Lancer (who came from the 3rd century-based Fenian Cycle of Irish Mythology), Cú Chulainn is a figure from the 1st century-based Ulster Cycle, which is a good two centuries older. Also, based on performance and durability throughout their tenure in battle, Cú Chulainn does seem to be the superior warrior — especially when you consider that Cú Chulainn survives a spear to the heart long enough to kill the one responsible (albeit only thanks to his Battle Continuation), while Diarmuid goes out in a very undignified fashion.
• One-Hit Kill: The entire point of Gae Bolg's activated ability. There is no way for it to miss the target's heart unless their Luck stat is high enough, they have some form of attack nullification (Heracles's God Hand which nullifies attacks of A-Rank and below, though Word of God states Lancer can get around this by using his Runes to temporarily boost his Noble Phantasm rank) or they have special conceptual defensive Noble Phantasms, such as Archer's Rho Aias, though Gae Bolg manages to completely destroy it.
• Out of Focus: Ends up as this in the Heaven's Feel route, being among the first Servants to die.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: Poor Lancer gets this hard. He's one of the most impressive Servants you'll ever see in the Lancer class, but thanks to his Master's Command Seal, he is not allowed to go all out and has to retreat his first battle with any Servant if they even remotely have the skill to oppose him. Even his normally used Gae Bolg technique is much less flashy or effective than many other Noble Phantasms, since it's affected by Luck and he tends to use it quite early in the War.
• Pretty Boy: Surprisingly for the Fate franchise, it's mythologically accurate. When he wasn't in the middle of one of his infamous berserker rages, Cu Chulainn was described as being slim, wiry, fine-boned, and more beautiful than handsome despite his fearsome reputation and monstrous strength.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: How he went out in Unlimited Blade Works. Kirei uses his Command Spell to order Lancer to commit suicide, causing him to stab himself in the heart with Gáe Bolg. His Battle Continuation skill gives him the last laugh over Kirei.
• Punch-Clock Villain: He appears to be a villain at first, what with killing Shirou and all, but that's only because his Master ordered him to. He's affable when he's not under orders, and even when he is, he makes it clear he's not enjoying doing so.
• Rasputinian Death: In life he was so notoriously hard to kill that his enemies had to resort to Loophole Abuse to get it done, so it's no surprise that his death in Unlimited Blade Works not only takes a while but gets him the last laugh over Kirei.
• Red Baron: "Cú Chulainn" means "Culann's hound". In-game, he's also referred to as "Ireland's Child of Light" on top of this.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Ultimately subverted, though at first he looks like he's playing it straight. He may have quite a bit of bloodlust, and tries to kill Shirou, but he's actually not a bad guy.
• Red Herring: He first appears in the prologue near the boundary field set up at the school. While he denies any connection to it, he also says nothing to imply his Master didn't set it up and have him guard it. In all paths, it's revealed he had nothing to do with it.
• Runic Magic: Despite being a classed as a Lancer, he can still use the runes he learned in his life. Just not as much as when he's classed as a Caster.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: After helping the protagonists out against Caster and hearing that Archer kidnapped Rin, he volunteers to help Shirou get her back, despite it going against Kotomine's orders.
• Semi-Divine: Divinity Rank B, being the son of Lugh. It's what allows him to be immobilized by Enkidu.
• Shipper on Deck: For Rin/Shirou in Unlimited Blade Works, in a sense. Despite his flirting with her, he respects Shirou's protectiveness of Rin. When she states that they aren't a couple, he tells her that they already act like one.
• Slice-and-Dice Swordsmanship: He uses Gae Bolg for both thrusting and occasionally slashing.
• Spam Attack: He has a penchant for rapid-fire spear thrusts.
• Super-Speed: The fastest Servant of the war bar Rider, with swiftness rivalled only by Saber with her Mana Burst. Its depiction is taken to the extreme in the 2014 anime, where he is practically teleporting from Archer's perspective once he's allowed to go all out.
• Taking You with Me: He kills Kirei after being ordered to kill himself for refusing to rip out Rin's heart in Unlimited Blade Works.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: Snarking around his opponents seems to be one of his hobbies.
• The Tease: He flirts a lot with Tohsaka in Unlimited Blade Works even though he knows Tohsaka isn't really interested.
• Weapon Twirling: He does an awful lot of this in the 2014 Anime, sometimes as an attack but other times just to demonstrate his skill with a spear. It's also convenient way of getting into the proper stance to use his Noble Phantasm.
• The Worf Barrage: For all its reputation as a One-Hit Kill weapon, Gae Bolg has a really poor track record at actually killing anyone with one hit, or at all. The primary reason for this is because everyone he uses it on happens to have some way to survive it. Saber has a high Luck stat and basically wins the coin toss and Archer just happens to bring out a shield specifically made to counter missiles at the exact time that Lancer tries to use the thrown version of the attack. Basically, Lancer has really bad luck with his targets.
• Worf Had the Flu: He's actually a high-class Servant on par with Saber or Berserker in ability, but is hindered by his lack of fame in Japan. Even with that, he still manages to trash almost anyone he faces in any route, and even fight Gilgamesh for half a day in Fate route. In fact, he's held back only by his Master's Command Seal in almost every single one of his fights, preventing him from using his full potential. When he does have the freedom to fight without restraint, he able to casually Speed Blitz Archer in Unlimited Blade Works in their second fight, and easily could have beaten him at that point.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Wounds caused by Gae Bolg do not heal naturally. Mana-based healing like magic or Servants' Healing Factor works, but a normal human struck by it is doomed. The curse can be lifted if Gae Bolg is destroyed or if Cú himself dies. Being struck in the heart with it is also fatal and even Servants cannot survive it.

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Rider

Voiced by: Yuu Asakawa (JP), Karen Strassman (EN 2006 Anime, 2010 Unlimited Blade Works Movie), Melissa Fahn (EN 2015 Unlimited Blade Works Anime, 2018 Heaven's Feel Movie)

"You appear to be a brave person, unlike my master. I shall kill you kindly."

Rider is a tall, dark, silent and gorgeous Servant controlled by Shinji Matou. Rider is always seen with a blindfold and very long hair. Unlike Shinji, she is a little amiable; in fact, she dislikes him and considers him to be a coward. She wields a very long chain in battle with spikes on the ends. These chains make sounds like slithering snakes. Because Shinji is not a magus, he greatly holds back her true potential, making her one of the weakest Servants.

As she is so quiet and her Master is so difficult to deal with, she remains quite mysterious until the third route when she begins receiving more focus, which is also where her true identity, the Gorgon Medusa, is revealed.

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• Actually Not a Vampire: While Rider is of questionable humanity and both enjoys and is empowered by drinking blood, vampires are actually something different.
• Always Save the Girl: Rider's only concern is making sure Sakura stays safe. In Heaven's Feel, Rider tells Shirou that if he's thinking of killing Dark Sakura to save the world, then she will gladly kill him on the spot and let the world burn.
• Animal Motifs: Rider gets motifs of horses, for her ability to summon Pegasus, and snakes, as befits her real identity of Medusa.
• Anti-Magic: Rider has innate magic resistance as part of her class, although it's not quite Saber's level. Caster gets around this by having Kuzuki kill her in the route the two come to blows.
• Aroused by Their Voice: Shirou thinks her voice is incredibly beautiful.
• The Beastmaster: As the mother of the original Pegasus, she can summon it into battle by slashing her neck open as part of her Noble Phantasm, Bellerophon: The Bridle of Chivalry. It is far beyond the level of an ordinary pegasus thanks to its legend, approaching the level of a Dragon in terms of sheer power. It can lacerate people and warp buildings by simply flapping its wings. It also has the highest Magic Resistance in the entire war, able to brush off a blackened and overcharged Excalibur when combined with Shirou's Rho Aias.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Why she eventually warms up to and develops respect for Shirou, the first man, if not the first person besides Sakura, to ever show her unconditional kindness and treat her as another human being rather than a monster.
• Berserk Button: Command Spells and those who use them. In one bad end, she immediately drops her usual behavior and finishes Shirou off when he tries to summon Saber.
• Birds of a Feather: Sakura summoned Rider without using a catalyst. In the event a Master does not use a catalyst to summon a Servant, then the Grail will use the summoner's personality as one and summon the Servant most compatible with the summoner. This affinity is what makes Rider so attached to Sakura, as she sees her Master as someone similar to her past self and to be saved before she too turns into a monster.
• Blade on a Rope: She fights with a "Nameless Dagger", a long chain with a spike on each end.
• Blindfolded Vision: Her blindfold is stated in the Status sheets to seal all properties of her eyes, including vision, so she relies on her other senses for everything. It works well enough that her blindness isn't noticeable at all.
• Blood Magic: She can use her blood as a material component in a Noble Phantasm called Blood Fort Andromeda, which dissolves its victims into a slurry that Rider can then absorb as Mana. Likewise, the blood spilled by stabbing herself in the neck is the summoning vector for her Pegasus, her most powerful asset besides (and arguably above) her mystic eyes.
• Bowdlerise: While Fate plays into the idea that Medusa wasn't always a monster, the angle of her being raped by Poseidon is not present and the curse placed on her by Athena is merely because she was jealous of Gorgon Sister's beauty.
• Broken Bird: Her backstory. She was teased by her sisters for being mortal, and because Athena sent her followers to attack them, Rider turned into a man-eating monster that devoured them. At the time of her death, she reminisced that they did actually love one another and accepted that she misses her time with them. One of the reasons she is so sympathetic to Sakura is because she is broken too.
• Cain and Abel: In her backstory, she was constantly bullied by her sisters and devoured them after she turned into a monster. As she died, Rider realized that not only she did love them but that they'd let her eat them out of guilt for her condition being a result of trying to protect them, and would later consider their time together as her fondest memories.
• Cassandra Truth: Getting the good ending of Heaven's Feel is more or less dependent on whether Shirou chooses to listen to Rider when she tells him he is vital to Sakura's happiness. Ignoring her and reverting to his pointlessly suicidal habits leads to the Bittersweet Ending.
• Chain Pain: Her standard weapon is a nail attached to a long chain.
• The Champion: She fights for Sakura because no one else ever has.
• Chaotic Good: In-Universe alignment.
• Collared by Fashion: Wears a leather collar on her neck as part of her standard battle costume.
• Commonality Connection: Rider shares many similarities with her true Master, Sakura, which is why the two of them get along and are compatible.
• Dark Action Girl: She embraces this image. She wears a black outfit, can be rather ruthless and being a chosen hero means she's more than competent in fighting. The only thing preventing her from showing how badass she is was Shinji's uselessness as a Master.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Her appearance and abilities based in blood and darkness just scream dark creature and is not helped by her vampiric traits, but once you get to know her, she's really not that bad.
• Deadly Gaze: Cybele, the Mystic Eyes of Petrification, which will leave you Taken for Granite.
• Dream Walker: Her blindfold, Breaker Gorgon, also allows her to enter dreams. In Heaven's Feel, she enters Shirou's dream disguised as Rin to seduce him and steal his energy.
• Dressed Like a Dominatrix: Rider wears a black leotard dress with matching high legging boots and gloves. Her weapons are two spike chains that she can wrap her opponents in. She also wears a eye mask. Though, that last bit is justified since she's actually Medusa and needs to cover her eyes. Fate/hollow ataraxia reveals the BDSM look is actually coincidental.
• Dropped a Bridge on Her: In Unlimited Blade Works Rider dies anticlimactically off-screen against Caster and her Master.
• Dual Wield: Armed with a pair of giant nails chained together and wielded like daggers. They can also become invisible, allowing Rider to trap people with the chain.
• Facial Markings: She has some sort of rune on her forehead.
• Friendly Enemy: The only times she is hostile is when Shinji orders her to be. When she escorted Shirou out of the Matou Household in Fate she was surprisingly friendly. In the beginning of Unlimited Blade Works she compliments Shirou on his bravery in contrast to the cowardly Shinji.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: When she takes the blinders off, her eyes have a strange glowing quality. Shirou describes them as too beautiful for any human to possess, and could either be art the gods admired or a nature they cursed.
• Gorgeous Gorgon:
  • Her true identity is that of Medusa, the infamous gorgon of Greek myth. The original myths describe Medusa as looking hideous with snakes as her hair, but contrary to that, Rider has beautiful flowing hair and is even described as gorgeous in the game. Her backstory explains that her history is somewhat more complicated than the more abbreviated versions of her legend make it appear.
  • This is clarified in Fate/Grand Order, where she explicitly states that the body she has now is either the same body she had before being cursed by Athena, or is at least incredibly similar. So, this is apparently the same beauty that attracted Poseidon.
  Rin: To be blunt, she's really gorgeous. When a woman calls another woman gorgeous, you know it's true.
  • Her human appearance here may also be for the same reason Archer of Black whose real identity is Chiron, the famous centaur who acted as a teacher to many Greek heroes appeared as a human in Fate/Apocrypha — both Servants have true appearances that could never be mistaken for human and are so iconic as to make hiding their identity all but impossible. By having them manifest in human form, it makes it a great deal harder for their enemies to figure out who they are prior to their Noble Phantasms being unleashed. However, unlike Archer of Black, it's implied Rider's human form was her original one and that her monstrous form was a mutation born from a combination of being cursed, mentally breaking down over time and losing control of her power.
  • Three other forms of her appear in Fate/Grand Order, under the classes of Lancer, "Avenger" and Saber. Her Lancer form is a cute, young girl and the form she had at the start of her career in defending the Shapeless Isle, while the second is flat out named Gorgon instead of her actual name and appears as a winged, scaled woman with hair that turns into snakes, the third is a slightly younger version wielding the golden sword Chrysaor and more as the mother of monsters as she is able to summon numerous Greek monsters through her relation to Echidna. A fourth blackened version appears in the Grand Order anime as a Lancer; this form is basically Rider with no physical changes and wearing an adult-sized version of her Lancer outfit and weapon, and the Evil alignment and disposition one would expect of a blackened Servant.
• Hellish Pupils: Rider has unusual, square-shaped pupils that are used to identify her Glowing Eyes of Doom.
• Hidden Depths: In contrast to her Dominatrix appearance and her "silent killer" and "dutiful servant" demeanour in Unlimited Blade Works and Fate respectively, Medusa's inexperience with social interaction beyond her siblings leaves her unsure of how to communicate with others. Heaven's Feel shows this off especially as it reveals that Rider is very self-conscious about her height, anxious about having people serve her instead of the other way around and seems to fret rather noticeably when trying to correctly pronounce Shirou's name out of fear of insulting him. Shirou even lampshades this in the latter of these interactions, hypothesizing that Rider is secretly a klutz in her private life.
• Huge Schoolgirl: In Heaven's Feel, she's revealed as being self-conscious of her height.
• Image Song: "Shunji no Uzu" ("Instant Vortex")
• Inhuman Eye Concealers: Her Breaker Gorgon, which also negates the effects of her Mystic Eyes of Petrification.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: In one Bad End, she outright tells Shirou that she'll have an orgasm if she doesn't kill him off soon, because of his screams.
• I Shall Taunt You: In a blink-and-you-missed Passive-Aggressive Kombat moment during her exchange of words with Saber Alter before their final fight, Rider asks the Blackened Servant if the wording of her orders means that she won't attack Shirou unless he tries to attack her or get pass her. Saber Alter confirms this, but she adds that Shirou will advance even though he knows he can't defeat her because that's just who he is. Rider then breaks into her rarely seen smile and says "I see. You served him before me, after all. It's natural that you know his personality." This gets Saber Alter to narrow her eyes and wordlessly ready her sword. This hints that Rider figured out Saber still cares about Shirou at some deeply buried level and knew that she wouldn't take Rider calling herself his Servant too kindly. The taunt seems to work as it gets Saber Alter to prioritize defeating Rider, which helps Shirou's battle plan a lot.
  • It's even more explicit in the film adaptation; when she and Saber Alter clash in spring song, Rider smirks and outright gloats that Shirou won't intervene because Rider has his trust - all but stating she's basically taken Saber's place. This gets Saber Alter very visibly agitated and she even has a snarl on her face when attacking Rider afterwords.
• Kiss of the Vampire: She does this because of Shinji's inability to provide her with mana. One Bad End in Fate has her sucking the blood on Shirou's neck.
• Lightning Bruiser: Not as strong as Berserker or Saber, but trades power for sheer speed as the fastest Servant of the war while still able to snap spines as if they were twigs. Taken up to eleven once she summons Pegasus, with the highest Magical Resistance of the war (far surpassing Saber's), speed surpassing almost any other Servant, and force equivalent to a fortress wall crashing into someone.
• Magic Skirt: Extremely agile, jumping from wall to wall and across buildings with her skirt apparently glued to her thighs, never seeming to show anything no matter how many flips and jumps she does.
• Male Gaze: The Studio DEEN adaptation of Fate has a close-up of her butt during her fight with Caster, though of course it doesn't actually show anything.
• Mama Bear: She cares very much for her true Master, and from the instant she rejoins Sakura’s side her only objective is keeping her safe at all costs.
• Mark of the Supernatural: Her long mauve hair. Like most Nasuverse characters with odd hair colors, it's a good indication that she's not exactly human.
• Mercy Kill: In one certain Dead End, instead of letting Shirou suffer and melt under her blood fort, she drains him of his blood and quickly kills him.
• Mind Rape: Played with, in a disturbingly literal sense; when Shirou has an... er, interesting "dream" about Rin in Heaven's Feel, it's heavily implied to actually be Rider using Rin's image to seduce him and steal mana from him. This is due to "Rin" in the dream having Rider's inhuman eyes and, in one of the remastered variants, drinking Shirou's blood via neck-bite in the same manner Rider had with other students. It's even more literal in the original release with her actually flat-out having Shirou bend her over a desk and then mounting him immediately after he's finished, to the point the line between pleasure and suffering was heavily blurring in Shirou's narration. Even more disturbing is that, while heavily implied to be the former of these two^note due to Rider knowing how important Shirou is to Sakura, it's never explicitly confirmed in the novel whether this was all an illusion Rider created in Shirou's head or if she actually did brainwash him into having sex with her.^note If one considers Hollow Ataraxia to be canon however, than it's revealed that Rider only went as far as drinking Shirou's blood; the dream just kept him passive during it.
• Mini Dress Of Power: She wears a very short one-piece dress that doesn't restrict her from doing all kinds of crazy acrobatic stunts.
• Mirror Character: To Saber, as Shirou notes in Heaven's Feel when he mistakes her voice for Saber's despite the latter being "dead". Both started out as cold, unapproachable and devoted to their respective causes, not to mention having both sacrificed their humanity — metaphorically for Saber, literally for Rider — to protect what was close to them, only to get royally screwed by fate and lose everything they ever cared about anyway. They also both have surprisingly feminine sides, Saber getting embarrassed by her large appetite in an optional part of Fate while Rider in Heaven's Feel is revealed to have a complex about her height. They are also the only Servants who have the potential to survive past the Holy Grail War; Saber lives with Rin and Shirou in the "Sunny Day" Good End of Unlimited Blade Works, while Rider lives with Sakura and Shirou in the True End of Heaven's Feel. It's also revealed that they both developed affections for Shirou for much the same reason; he was the first boy who not only treated them kindly, but he treated them as just another person as opposed to a monster or mythic figure. Finally, they both have contrasting "evil" alter-egos who are stronger than themselves — Rider's is her monstrous Gorgon form which she can shift into if she overuses her supernatural strength, whereas Saber's is the Grail-corrupted and black-armored Saber Alter.
• Ms. Fanservice: The most scantily clad long-haired Statuesque Stunner lady in the visual novel.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: This is an actual, in-universe ability of hers — she's got the Monstrous Strength skill, which further erodes the already-tenuous link between a Servant's strength and mundane matters of physics and biology and makes their might mostly or entirely unnatural, letting even those with a slender build manifest bona-fide Super-Strength.
• Noble Demon: She describes herself in rather monstrous terms, can back it up easily and can take a sadistic pleasure in killing enemies, but she's disgusted by the likes of Shinji and isn't pointlessly cruel to anyone she has no grudge against.
• No Body Left Behind: Is vaporized by Saber's Excalibur in the Fate route. In the manga adaptation, she survives it if only because Sakura used her last Command Seal to command her to save Shinji from falling to his death, after which she fades away.
• No Eye in Magic: Played With. When her Mystic Eyes are activated, just not looking into them isn't enough, as they're powerful enough she can petrify people regardless. However, Rider does need to see the enemy herself to actually use them.
• Nothing Personal: She eventually realizes that Shirou is a good person who's opposing Sakura's Shadow out of self-defense, but she will still kill the shit out of him if he makes one wrong move.
• Pegasus: She summons and rides it for her Noble Phantasm, Bellerophon.
• Power Limiter: Her blindfold, the Breaker Gorgon Noble Phantasm, which prevents her from using her Glowing Eyes of Doom. Later on, she gets a pair of glasses similar to Shiki's, the same ones fashioned by Touko Aozaki, so she can have a more public appearance.
• Psycho Supporter: She cares about Sakura's life far, far more than what Sakura actually wants. After two incidents where she almost kills Shirou or lets him die to achieve this goal, Sakura Command Seals her to protect Shirou no matter what.
• The Quiet One: She keeps quiet around Shinji, but some awkward situations in her more casual moments during Heaven's Feel suggest she generally doesn't talk much.
• Related Differently in the Adaptation: Pegasus is usually considered to be the child of Medusa and Poseidon who was born from her severed neck, but here it is merely a gift given to her by Poseidon. Fate/Grand Order confirms that Chrysaor does exist, but how they're related to Medusa is left vague.
• Restraining Bolt: Shinji would have died a long time ago if it hadn't been for his possession of the Book of False Attendant, which Sakura gave him to allow him to command Rider.
• Sadist: Sometimes displays a lascivious response toward her enemies upon defeating them. This is best exemplified in one bad end in Unlimited Blade Works where Shirou tries to summon Saber; Rider will cut off one arm and leave him strung up to a tree by his remaining one to bleed out, her parting words being that the only reason she won't stay and gouge his eyes out is because doing so would make her orgasm.
• Secret Test of Character: Appears to subject Shirou to this in Unlimited Blade Works; in the bad end of their encounter, Rider will reveal she was deliberately toying with him to try and force him into using a Command Seal so as to test if he sees Servants as a tool to fall back on. If he gives in and tries to call Saber, she'll sever his arm and leave him strung up to bleed out, but if he perseveres she'll continue dragging things out until Rin intervenes and forces her to retreat.
• Semi-Divine: Divinity Rank E-; she originally had a higher rank, but after being turned into a demonic beast, Rider's divinity was reduced.
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: In her backstory. Because she and her sisters were born out of mankind's wishes for perfect gods, their beauty earned them the ire of Athena, who sent her followers to attack them. She ended up becoming a monster out of her resentment for what humans did to them.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: She says twice that she doesn't care whether Shirou finds her more attractive than Sakura, but her angry expression when he says he doesn't shows otherwise.
• Square Race, Round Class:
  • Not quite "race", but it briefly comes up in the VN itself and sequels, adaptations and the like expand on the idea that this is another factor preventing her from performing as well as some of the other Servants. Many Heroic Spirits qualify for multiple Class containers, and while the Heroic Spirit who is Rider in this story qualifies as Rider, has the Noble Phantasms for it and is summoned as such, it isn't necessarily the class this Heroic Spirit is strongest in; if some of her Noble Phantasms seem kludgy and awkward, that's because in this form, they are. Grand Order, in particular, suggests that she's far stronger as either Lancer (surprisingly)... or as "Avenger", a non-standard container that is not typically utilized in the Fuyuki summoning system. Avenger manifests her in the full, terrible glory of her Gorgon form permanently, further empowered by Grail corruption, giving her full access to the powers one more typically associates with Medusa the Gorgon, including a vastly more effective Bloodfort and the ability to utilize her Mystic Eyes in a way almost like a Wave-Motion Gun. Meanwhile, while a blackened version briefly shows up in the First Order OVA as a very similar Servant to the one seen here, her proper Lancer version in GO manifests as Medusa at the start of her career as guardian of the Shapeless Isle, when she was much closer to her sisters and her Divinity. In this form, she's a lot more like F/SN's Lancer, simply using the sheer power of her Goddess Essence, far higher Magic Resistance and pure determination to protect those she loves to overwhelm enemies and empower everything she does. As Rider, Medusa has access to neither of these advantages (having lost virtually all of her Goddess Essence/Divinity leaving it unable to empower her body and Cybele Mystic Eyes, but also being unable or unwilling to embrace the full monstrosity of her Gorgon form) and simply has to make do with a limited form of Bloodfort Andromeda, weaker Mystic Eyes and her awkward relationship to the Pegasus.
  • Interestingly, when he shows up in humanoid form in Grand Order, Aŋra mentions that he could tell even early on that Medusa had the potential to be an Avenger within her and was a bit taken aback; during Heaven's Feel, you can notice that The Shadow is somewhat less eager to engage Medusa. While this is also likely due to Sakura not wanting to hurt Medusa, in retrospect it comes across as Aŋra not wanting to risk Medusa overusing Monstrous Strength and calling upon the full breadth of her Gorgon form.
• Statuesque Stunner: Quite literally considering her powers. By far the tallest female in the game and described as beautiful.
• The Stoic: Rider's facial expression rarely changes even in the face of danger or Shinji's threats.
• Stripperiffic: A short black dress with cutoff black and magenta armour on the legs. The total amount of raw flesh exposed is actually fairly low, but clearly designed more with fanservice in mind than combat.
• Stronger with Age: When she summons Pegasus, she explains that Pegasus had never died, he survived all the way to the modern era. Since he's lived for so long, he's now as powerful as a dragon.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: She's a loyal and kind person but she does not look it. The first impression Shirou has of her is that she reeks of blood, but not necessarily in a bad way.
• Super-Speed: The highest top speed of the war and incredibly agile, able to run straight up and across walls with ease. This also applies to anything she rides, allowing her to keep up with motorcycles on a granny bike!
• Super-Strength: She typically doesn't use it, though, favouring her agility. The reason for this is that she might revert into a monster if she overdoes it.
• Taken for Granite: As Medusa, anyone she looks at will be turned to stone. One bad end has Shirou charge at her with his eyes closed, but he still turns to stone.
• Think Nothing of It: An anti-hero example, but Rider — at least initially — does not ask for nor want for anything more than the safety and happiness of her Master, Sakura. To that end, she'll do anything and everything without question — even put up with the likes of Shinji — and regard any credit as having simply been her properly following orders. It's to the point that in Heaven's Feel, even having Shirou and Sakura volunteer to cook her a meal leaves her awkwardly fumbling just on how to react, much less respond.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: After two routes as the weakest Servant due to Shinji and always being the first to be eliminated, Heaven's Feel shows the extent of her power if not being held back by Shinji and lets her survive the whole storyline, Epilogue included.
• Tragic Monster: Athena cursed Medusa and her sisters simply because she was jealous of their beauty. Medusa wanted nothing more than to protect her sisters (who bullied her constantly, but actually loved her in their own way), but ended up turning into the Gorgon and devouring them herself.
• Villainous Crush: She's almost as hot for Shirou as Sakura is, in part because of the courage he shows by fighting against her. In her previous life, the only mortal men she ever met were trying to murder her, so it's possible her romantic expectations are a bit warped.
• Wall Crawl: She can crawl along walls and ceilings, and even casually walk on walls.
• When She Smiles: Rider's smiling sprite is very rarely used. Out of combat, it appears exactly once in the whole visual novel at the end of an optional scene (Shirou looking for her on the morning of the 11th day of the Heaven's Feel route).
• Worf Had the Flu: In both Fate and Unlimited Blade Works, she is weakened by Shinji's inability to provide her a reliable source of magical energy. In Heaven's Feel where she is Sakura's Servant, she becomes far more powerful and is able to defeat True Assassin, go toe-to-toe with Archer, and briefly hold back Saber Alter.

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Berserker

Voiced by: Tadahisa Saizen (JP), Michael McConnohie (EN)

"▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅!"

A very huge and very un-Gentle Giant: The mad Servant Berserker. This is the Servant of Ilyasviel von Einzbern, who immediately invoked the "Mad Enhancement" skill exclusive to Berserkers to strip him of his sanity and speaking ability in exchange for boosting his (already unprecedented) statline. Despite his bouts of insanity and the Berserker class' reputation of killing their own Masters, Berserker is entirely loyal to his Master.

His identity, immediately told by Ilya, is in fact Greek Mythology's World's Strongest Man and all around badass: Heracles. Due to his wide range of talents, Heracles could fulfill the role of any of the seven Classes except Caster. Unfortunately, he was summoned as a Berserker and is unable to use his Noble Phantasm Nine Lives or the Bow of the Hydra. Despite this, his ludicrous speed, strength and resilience make him easily the most powerful Servant summoned to fight in the Fifth Holy Grail War.

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• The Ace: He can fulfill the role of any of the seven Classes except Caster. Despite the Berserker class being arguably his weakest class, he's still a Nigh-Invulnerable Lightning Bruiser who's better at dealing with the effects of his mad state than most heroes would be owing to his episodes of god-induced madness and Unstoppable Rage in life. Again, he's friggin Heracles.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Once again, courtesy of the the UBW anime, he's much less Gonk, looking more like a extremely wild-haired Barbarian Hero than the "Borderline rock man" from the original. This look is fine-tuned even further in the Heaven's Feel movie, where he looks like a monstrous humanoid straight out of Berserk; This is probably a deliberate difference between portrayals as the UBW anime also explored the more humane side of Berserker through Ilya's memories, while in HF he's just there to fuck shit up.
• Adaptational Badass: Twice, in different manners.
  • In the Anime adaptation of Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works], Berserker is shown as keeping his finesse in swordmanship and even close quarter combat in spite of his insanity, through pure muscle memory and instinct, much like the Black Knight did in Fate/Zero.
  • On the other hand, he is absolutely untouchable in the first Heaven's Feel movie, where he throws Saber around like a volleyball and uses the momentum from her only proper counterattack to blow her away with a single punch.
• Adaptational Wimp: Yet again in the same anime, he's shown to be much less Nigh-Invulnerable, and both his strength, speed and sheer endurance even ignoring his Noble Phantasm have been decreased to the point where Saber, who in the Visual Novel can't last more than a minute or two against him, can take him head-on. Although that's more a result of Saber being multiple levels more badass than Berserker being less so. Averted, however, in the Heaven's Feel movie, where he thoroughly trounces Saber with minimal effort. In Lost Butterfly, he initially seems to have completely wimped out, easily losing to Saber Alter and the Grail Mud, only to break out of said Mud and throw her around like a ragdoll before getting put down by several point-blank Excalibur Morgans.
• Adaptation Expansion: In Spring Song, Shirou tracing Nine Lives floods his mind with images of Herakles completing the Twelve Labors and shows him crying in despair over the death of his child due to Hera robbing him of his sanity, giving old-school fans and new ones alike a better look into Berserker's life in part because he's become a huge fan-favorite despite having all of three verbal lines in the Visual Novel.
• Adaptive Ability: God Hand renders Berserker immune to any attack that has killed him before, as long as he's got a life left to use for a regeneration. It's more of an Informed Ability than anything since nobody ever tries to use the same attack on him twice on-screen. At least until the second Heaven's Feel movie, Lost Butterfly. After Saber Alter kills him by stabbing and blasting him with Excalibur Morgan, she notices her attacks now have no effect. She simply increases her attacks' power every time she uses them until they can kill him again.
• Animal Motifs: His mane-like hair, slitted pupils, letting off a deep purr that occasionally turns into an ear-rending growl when feeling threatened like a great cat makes him seem almost lion-esque. Fitting for the man who wore a lion's pelt on his head for a majority of his life.
• Anti-Villain: He's only an antagonist in that he follows Illya's orders without question, but he has no actual malice towards anyone except Saber Alter, The Shadow and Gilgamesh who he instinctively perceives as dangerous to his Master. In the two scenes where he is lucid, he shows that he is both level-headed and has a remarkable amount of insight, giving due respect to the opponents he had just been trying to massacre.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Even though he was incredibly skilled with every weapon during his life, the Berserker class has made his mind give into madness so he can only swing the giant sword around. It works disgustingly well, and his natural instinct in the form of his Eye of the Mind still functions through the cloud of madness in his mind.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Berserker is a walking death machine who is borderline undefeatable in a straight mano-a-mano fight, but has a prohibitive mana expendature that's only solved by Illya being a living furnace of mana as a Homunculus. The biggest impracticality is that Herakles could also been a lot more than just a human blender invoking Chunky Salsa Rule on whatever he touches if he wasn't Berserker, but the Einzbern are infamous for this trope in general and Min-Maxing his already prodigious statline a bit more was never gonna be the thing that got them the gold medal.
• Awesomeness Is Volatile: His Killing Intent and sheer inhuman power is so intense that it makes people recoil or go into deer-in-headlights mode. When pushed to his limits such as against Saber Alter, it becomes so intense that it makes his surroundings explode while smashing her head into the dirt.
• Back from the Dead: God Hand grants him twelve extra lives, though powerful-enough attacks can take more than one life at once.
• Bare-Fisted Monk: Naturally. He's the inventor of Pankration^note A brutal early form of Mixed Martial Arts popular in Ancient Greece with no holds barred, and only eye-gouging and Groin Attack being banned (At least among the Spartans. Other Hellenic city states had rules in place and strict refereeing to avoid crippling or killing the opponent), fought in the nude or with a loincloth; Usually contests were resolved by wrestling, submission holds and dirty boxing, but one contemporary piece of Greek comedy alludes to a donkey winning the Olympic Games in Pankration, implying kicks were also a major factor., and as such is a supreme martial artist that is said to be the greatest Servant of all in hand-to-hand combat when sane. While he can still use a bit of it as seen in the UBW anime, he doesn't make more of it due to him becoming a Berserker.
• Berserk Button: Daring to attack Illya. So much so that Gilgamesh stabbing her causes him to come back to life.
• The Berserker: Completely devoid of rational thought because he was summoned in this class.
• Beyond the Impossible:
  • The Twelve Labors were considered this, even by other contemporary Greek heroes. Heracles didn't care, and as Berserker, he doesn't have the capacity to care.
  • In life, he developed the technique Nine Lives, which turns an arrow into a Rain of Arrows, and when used with a melee weapon, allows him to perform nine simultaneous strikes. Basically, three of Assassin's Tsubame Gaeshi at once, unleashed by someone just over four times Assassin's size.
  • In Unlimited Blade Works, he utterly shocks Gilgamesh by coming back to life even though Gilgamesh had already killed him twelve times and by breaking the unbreakable-to-divine beings chain Enkidu.
  • In Heaven's Feel, he tears his way out of the Shadow by force and rips off his own skin just so he won't have God Hand after being eaten by the Shadow. In Lost Butterfly this is changed to him initially going into the Mud with little resistance only to easily tear out and beat Saber Alter's ass when Illya calls out for him, losing all his extra lives in the process of his titanic battle with Saber Alter, and reviving with only one live remaining. He still proceeded to do the impossible in such a pitiful state by stopping his final attack that would have chopped Shirou in half even after he pulled out all the stops to even fight Dark Berserker.
• BFS: His weapon is referred to in-game as an axe-sword, and for good reason.
• Black Eyes of Crazy: He has black sclera and red irises when under the influence of Mad Enhancement. When Illya restrains him, his sclera are white and his irises are the same color as his skin — though they're also sometimes drawn as being yellow.
• Blade Spam: Nine Lives is Berserker's second Noble Phantasm and can't be used in-story because his class ability Mad Enhancement won't let him. The actual Noble Phantasm itself, derived from Herakles's feat of defeating the many-headed, nigh-immortal Hydra with his bow and arrows, was never used by Berserker himself in Fate/stay night. However, when Shirou in the Heaven's Feel route used his Projection magic to adapt the Noble Phantasm for his own use, the resulting "Nine Lives Blade Works" was composed of eight simultaneous slashes from different directions in one instant, followed by a stab to the center, all done with Super-Speed. Fate/unlimited codes resorted to depicting Nine Lives as butchering an enemy by hitting them one hundred times in a short span of time.
• Blessed with Suck: Sure, when Mad Enhancement is active he's faster and stronger, but on the other hand it strips him of rationality and prevents him from using any of his Noble Phantasms apart from God Hand, which is passive. Thus, Berserker is actually one of his worst classes.
• Boring, but Practical: Since he's rendered insane by the way of his summoning, he can't access the huge arsenal of weapons and god-given tools from his labors the way Cu can use his runes while being a Lancer, and simply destroys everything through overwhelming physicality and power from being a near 700 pound brick of demigod muscle. He's a pure warrior who is so physically superior to his competition that he doesn't even need the techniques he once had.
• Breaking the Bonds:
  • In Unlimited Blade Works, he manages to break Enkidu, which actually manages to shock Gilgamesh, since the chain is designed to trap gods. The chains that held down the Kaiju sized Bull of heaven snap like rusty wire when Gilgamesh goes to kill Illya.
  • In Heaven's Feel, he's able to break out of the Shadow by pure brute force and Heroic Willpower, despite the fact that the Grail, and by extension the Shadow, should be something he as a Servant cannot resist.
• Bruiser with a Soft Center: Not that he gets to display it much, but he's extremely protective of his Master, who he identifies as an abused child who needs a guardian like him more than anything else. Illya bemoans that she never got him to pick her up and hold her tight like a father would as she is dying in Unlimited Blade Works, showing that she clearly recognized and loved this side of Berserker.
• Character Alignment: In-Universe alignment is Chaotic Insane, which probably pegs him under Chaotic Neutral. He lacks the rationality to make moral judgments, but apparently under normal circumstances he would be Chaotic Good.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: His profile in-game and Archer's comments in the anime denotes that his lifetime of fighting in every avenue of combat and his godly physique means that even while Berserker is completely off his rocker with very limited higher functions, he is able to perform astounding feats of physical skill and agility because such moves are simple muscle memory to him. See Unskilled, but Strong for details.
• Cool Sword: Amusingly Played With. His weapon is not actually one of his many weapons from his life, but a piece of rock from one of the temples dedicated to him shaped into a sword by the Einzberns to be used as the catalyst for his summoning. This only makes him clashing it against the other legendary weapons in the Holy Grail War all the more impressive; He's taking on things such as Excalibur and the Gate of Babylon with nothing more than a normal piece of stone.
• Counter-Attack: Used to beautiful effect against Saber in the Heaven's Feel movie. She strikes his sword to parry him with all her might, blowing it back and in theory leaving him open to attack... Only for Berserker to use the backwards momentum to dig his heels in and punch her so hard her breastplate is blown to pieces, the impact almost knocking her out cold.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Madness Enhancement was meant to be used on weaker Servants as to make up for their lack of strength. The problem with applying it to Heracles is that he's already an absolute cream-of-the-crop Heroic Spirit who doesn't need it, especially since it costs him his fighting skills and several Noble Phantasms. This trade-off of all his combat prowess for more raw power results in him performing poorly in combat with God Hand and his (already insanely overpowered before Madness Enhancement) physicality being the chief reason why he's so troublesome to deal with.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: His first fight with Saber in Fate and Heaven's Feel. His sheer speed and strength completely overwhelm her leaving unable to mount any real resistance. She does better in Unlimited Blade Works as the fight occurs in a different place and she's able to lure him to area where the terrain favored her.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: He hands out one of the most brutal beatings imaginable to his opponent in Lost Butterfly, but is ultimately unable to beat Saber's Shadow-induced Story-Breaker Power.
• Dance Battler: Notably pulls off a series of Capoeira-like spin kicks against Saber when she tried to disarm him, the force of which send her flying like a baseball.
• Death Is Cheap: He dies a number of times in his fight against Archer, yet goes on to face Saber. This is because his Noble Phantasm possesses eleven layers of automatic revival magic, meaning he needs to get killed twelve times to die.
• Defiant to the End: If Berserker senses any harm coming Illya's way, he will never back down until whatever displeases her is in bloody pieces or she is out of harm's way. Despite being at a complete disadvantage against Gilgamesh, he refuses to stop charging at him in a straight line because any other form of attack would risk Illya being hit by the Storm of Blades flying their way. Even when he's swallowed up and brainwashed by the six billion curses of the Grail Mud, he instictively ceases his otherwise lethal attack on Shirou when Illya comes out of hiding.
• Determinator:
  • In the visual novel, his character sheet denotes this with Battle Continuation A, tying with Lancer who could hold out for 12 hours in a Last Stand against Gilgamesh because of this and Bravery A+, which makes him immune to all Magecraft affecting his psyche and increase his melee damage from always being willing and able to push his insanely powerful body to it's limits even in the face of death and horrific injury to reduce whatever Illya needs dead to a paste on the wall.
  • Archer 2 outright calls Berserker unyielding,^note the exact wording is 不撓不屈, which is an old idiom that means, lit., "Unbent, Unscratched", which is used to denote a state of mind in war and martial arts where one will never give up no matter what even in the face of inevitable death. the shining example if not embodiment of human perseverance against overwhelming odds through their strength, will and ingenuity. Considering he comes back to life and breaks a chain that is supposed to be unbreakable on a Servant of his divinity through sheer willpower, Gilgamesh wasn't exaggerating.
• Died Standing Up: He never falls during his death. He always disappears standing, possibly because he's too huge to topple over.
• Disc-One Final Boss: In Fate, he is introduced early on as the biggest threat among the known Servants. He is defeated in a truly desperate and climactic battle, and no other Servant was thought to be on his level. That's when the bigger villains show...
• The Dreaded:
  • Heracles is by no small margin the strongest of the seven Servants summoned and leaves Shirou and Rin with a very strong impression of his incredible power on the first night of the War, where he either dunks on Saber with ease or comes out completely unscathed from fighting Saber and Archer, renowned as the strongest Classes, at the same time. Caster and Rider also give him a massive berth, never getting involved where Berserker is in any of the three routes because they knew of him in their own "lifetimes", if you can call mythological figures like them that. Even Gilgamesh has a brief cold-sweat when Berserker comes back to life from sheer willpower to try and tear him a new one for stabbing Illya.
  • In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot in Lost Butterfly, even Saber Alter visibly hesitates to bring her sword to bear against him for a moment towards the end of the fight, in part from the sheer wind pressure Heracles is exuding but also because even stronger than she could ever be, the man simply ''will'' not stay down.
• Dying as Yourself:
  • In Fate, he regains his sanity when Shirou and Saber defeat him for the final time. He uses his last moments to congratulate them on their victory and marvel on the power of Caliburn.
  • In Heaven's Feel, he regains his sanity when Shirou kills him. He uses his last moments to ask Shirou to protect Illya.
• Famed In-Story: Heracles is one of the most famous characters in literature and art both in and out-of-universe, no two ways about it. This works to his advantage in the story, as he can be summoned near the peak of his strength no matter where the Holy Grail War takes place, but he would get a noticeable boost in Europe and an especially sharp boost in Greece. Later supplimentary material from Fate/Apocrypha relevant to bogus Grail Wars ran around the world after the basic setup for it was leaked by Darnic implies that the world literally ran dry of viable catalysts for Heracles because he's one of the first and most powerful figures you'd default to when you think of the word "hero".
• Faster Than They Look: One would think that the movements of a veritable hulk of a man like Heracles would be an antithesis of speed and agility, and yet that couldn't be farther from the truth. He is a Lightning Bruiser through and through, moving with such inhuman speed in spite of his sheer massiveness that Shirou initially goes into denial at the sight.
• Flash Step: In the Ufotable adaptations, he has a habit of sending Saber flying into the air by just powering through their attempt at parrying him, before doing this, vanishing from sight and appearing right behind her in a ridiculous display of both stealth and speed, before sending her into the ground with an overhead swing, to the point where it basically becomes a Signature Move of his to just vanish and appear behind his next target.
• Flat Character: The only thing that can be said about him not related to his combat abilities is that he likes Illya a lot. The rest of his behavior you'll have to rationalize on your own based on his legend.
• Gentle Giant: Towards Ilya. Even though he should be stark raving mad and kill anything in sight, he protects her and carries her around almost like a father. This was usually the case in myth as well (with his Harmful to Minors incident explicitly being Hera punishing him for being Zeus' bastard son as harshly as she could), though you still didn't want to get on his bad side. Illya acknowledges as much in-universe:
  Illya: "With you by my side, I can rest easy because you always protected me. You might have been scary, but really you were so kind. You were so big, like Father. In truth, I really wanted you to scoop me into your arms just once."
• Glad He's On Our Side: In Lost Butterfly, this seems to be the expression on Shirou and Rin's faces as they observe his titanic clash with Saber Alter.
• Gonk: The Berserker class's Mad Enhancement has some effect on his physique, notable after things like his head explodes, re-grows, and looks somewhat normal for a moment. Nasu clarifies that he would indeed maintain the same size under other classes, but his muscles would be a bit softer, he wouldn't have his elbow spikes, and his face would look less bestial.
• Graceful Loser: Compliments Saber and Shirou on beating him in his final moments, where he has regained his sanity.
• Hellish Pupils: Some of his artwork in spinoff games and a closeup of his eyes in Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. lost butterfly shows that he has vertically-slitted pupils — at least while under the influence of Mad Enhancement, though it's seemingly a common trait for demigods as Lancer and Archer II have similar eyes, though theirs are red as compared to Herakles' golden pupils.
• Hero Antagonist: He very briefly becomes one in Heaven's Feel, where he fights against the far more sinister Zouken, True Assassin, and Saber Alter.
• Heroic Build: He is over 300 kilos of shredded muscle, to the point where he looks more like a walking dark-skinned marble statue than he does a man. The Ufotable animations make exceptional use of this with both posing and angling, making someone explicitly called the protector of mankind in Ancient Greek literature look decidedly inhuman, or perhaps too human for someone of Berserker's prodigious bulk.
• Heroic Willpower: He's explicitly able to No-Sell Command Spells if he does not want to obey the order given to him, even through his madness. In the anime, he outright survives death 12 times trying to defend Illya from Gilgamesh and revived one last time to take him down with him, despite God Hand only giving Berserker 11 extra lives. In Lost Butterfly, he initially looks to have been completely absorbed by the Shadow after Saber Alter strikes him only to reform his body through sheer will, break out of the mud and send Saber flying, completely unaffected by the Shadow.
• Hope Spot: Invoked by his Noble Phantasm. Just when you think you manage to barely make it out alive against one of the strongest demigods imaginable, his head will grow back. His ashen body will rejuvenate from incineration, he'll stitch his entire torso back together in seconds after being Half the Man He Used to Be'd by a Sword Beam through the heart. And he's now nigh-immune to whatever you did to him last time. You might be able to make him stay down if you can pull something similar off a dozen more times. Key word might. If you're not Gilgamesh, good luck.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Extreme height difference between him and his Master, Ilya. Berserker towers 1.2 meters over Ilya, and is about five times as broad.
  • For those of you who don't use metric here's some math; Berserker's height is listed at 253cm (8ft 3in), Illya's is 133cm (4ft 4in). Weight wise, Berserker is 311kg (685lb 10.203oz), Illya is 34kg (74lb 15.315oz). Yes, he is about four feet taller than his Master and nine times heavier than her.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Ilya has been holding back the boost he would be getting from his Mad Enhancement, meaning that his curbstomps until his final battle in Fate had been the same even if he wasn't a Berserker. Retconned in later Realta Nua edition. Instead of negating actual stat buff, Ilya simply controlled him to the extent, and only during last battle, which conveniently happens in uninhabited forest, she finally allows him to cut loose. This actually makes much more sense, since Berserker's boosted statistics is clearly visible through Master's Stat-O-Vision even on their very first encounter.
• Implacable Man: Bordering on full-on The Juggernaut status, as he's Nigh-Invulnerable and even if you could kill him he'll just get back up again. Twelve times.
• Irony: Word of God has stated that Heracles could make the most effective use of his Noble Phantasms if he was in the Archer class, but he was designated to the hand-to-hand, in-your-face Berserker class. Additionally, the Einzberns did this to make sure they had a Servant that couldn't betray them, but given what glimpses of his personality we get through his cloud of madness, Herakles would have been remarkably easy to work with and a hardcore Papa Wolf if he was sane.
• It Can Think: Averted. He can only project simple surface thoughts that Illya can understand and otherwise acts on instinct, and he has lost his swordsmanship that could rival even Assassin's. However, the game makes repeated statements that with enough strength and agility, one can replicate things that would require incredible skill unintentionally, and combined with his still-remaining combat instincts, he can truly come across as still possessing his martial skill.
• It Only Works Once: If an attack does manage to harm him, he will gain a resistance to it after healing (the example given in an interview for the UBW anime is that he'd receive "Fire resistance +100" if exposed to Kill It with Fire). This means that not only does whoever is unlucky enough to face him will have to use powerful attacks, they will also need to think of twelve different ways to kill him in order to put him down for good. However, Saber Alter shows that you can use the same technique twice; you just have to have enough mana to keep raising it's strength over and over until it's able to kill him again.
• Killing Intent: Radiates one so intense that it completely freezes Shirou and Rin in place the first time they see him. This is while Berserker is calm, mind you.
• King of Beasts: He's more like a lion trapped in the shape of a man than a mere madman, and with his size and agility his fighting style is completely unrecognizable from anything a human might use and more like the attack of a huge predator mauling it's prey. Given the heroic figure Berserker was this shouldn't come as a surprise.
  Archer: "He's more like an embodiment of savagery than a mad warrior."
• The Law of Diminishing Defensive Effort: Berserker is completely immune to all attacks beneath "A"-rank and consequently never bothers to go on the defensive except in the most extreme cases. He also normally has the ability to sense harm through sheer instinct, but can't use it because of his insanity.
• Leitmotif: The second Heaven's Feel movie gives him one in He Comes Back Again and Again, an opera-esque that plays as Heracles makes his desperate and valiant Last Stand against Saber Alter to protect Illya with every fiber of his being. And then, he came back again.
• Lightning Bruiser: Despite his hulking size that towers a good meter above all other characters, he completely avoids the Mighty Glacier trope and displays both speed, strength and toughness greatly superior to any other Servant. Shirou outright refuses to believe that Berserker is able to move so fast at first after describing him as looking like he's made out of rock. Stats-wise he dwarfs the competition with A+ Strength and A in every statistic except Luck, which is still at a respectable B despite his life story as a Cosmic Plaything.
• Made of Iron: Even without God Hand, he's incredibly tough, as Shirou tearing him to bits with Nine Lives Blade Works doesn't even slow down his assault.
• Magically Inept Fighter: It's mentioned that the one class Heracles doesn't qualify for is Caster, thus making him this both as a Berserker and not.
• Super-Scream: His roars are so intense that they produce hurricane winds, blowing up dust and debris whenever he gets vocal.
• Master Archer: As in myth, he is stated to have been a master archer by the narration — sadly, he's summoned to the one class where all his combat skills are completely suppressed by madness. Late in Heaven's Feel, Shirou is able to use Berserker's sword to copy the original hero's skill, letting him adapt one of Herakles' bow techniques — said technique allows him to inflict a hundred blows on his opponent near simultaneously, simulating how Herakles in the Fate-verse used his bow to strike every head of the hydra off using a barrage of arrows.
• Master of All: He'd be this even more if he was sane, but even when batshit crazy he's this when it comes to a melee. He's strong enough that buildings frequently cave in around his victim from the force of his attacks, murderously fast and stupefyingly agile for his size, and easily the most durable Servant in the war, in no small part because of his Noble Phantasm. Best displayed in Lost Butterfly where even if Saber Alter is ultimately victorious against him, she's completely overwhelmed by him for the majority of their fight, only making it out on top thanks to her literally bottomless Mana source augmenting her defenses to a ludicrous degree and letting her spam her Noble Phantasm without restraint.
• Mighty Glacier: In Fate/unlimited codes, he's this instead of full blown Lightning Bruiser for balance purposes.
• Monstrous Humanoid: Heracles' Mad Enhancement has done more than turn him into a raging berserker, warping his already eight-foot-tall hulking frame into a monster, turning his skin charcoal grey, giving him Black Eyes of Crazy, fangs, and elbow spikes.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Completely averted unlike with the rest of the cast, where even the most hardcore of melee fighter Servants usually have more of an athlete's build or appear outright waifish, but Heracles looks like he's ready to walk onto stage for Mr. Olympia's gigaheavyweight division and take the trophy, and is by a country and a mile the best of the bunch in physical attributes.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Only the best weapons/attacks can hurt him at all and he gains incredible resistance to anything that has already hurt him.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Good lord, he hands out one of the most insane ones ever put on the big screen to his opponent in Lost Butterfly. It unfortunately didn't stick due to Saber Alter having Nigh-Invulnerability, but it was still enough to almost make you feel sorry for her, the bad guy.
• Normally, I Would Be Dead Now: Like Lancer, Berserker has "Battle Continuation". Like Lancer, he gets to showcase it in Unlimited Blade Works where it allows him to stand up to Gilgamesh long enough for Ilya to die in peace.
• No-Sell: God Hand works by denying the very concept of an attack below 'A' rank being able to harm Berserker, meaning that as long as an attack isn't high enough rank Berserker won't even register it no matter how much power is behind it or how much collateral damage it does.
  • Also hilariously no sells an attempted Excalibur by Saber in one Bad End where he just casually blocks it even as it incinerates the ground around him and kills her instantly.
• One-Handed Zweihänder: His "sword" is more like a massive chunk of rock with a hilt, but being huge and insanely strong makes it easy for him to swing it around as if it's nothing. His hands are also simply too large to have both of them on the handle.
• One-Hit Polykill: The closest thing he has to a weakness. Sufficiently powerful Noble Phantasms (like Caliburn) are capable of killing him multiple times with a single, fatal blow, reducing his number available lives quite quickly. Though its implied that Noble Phantasms capable of doing this are few and far between. In Lost Butterfly, Saber Alter kills him a half dozen times before hitting him with an Excalibur of unfathomable proportions, and Berserker was still trying to get back up to fight on despite being a just a burned torso afterwards.
• Quantity vs. Quality: In Lost Butterfly, he is the Quality to Saber Alter's Quantity: He's shown to be the far superior fighter, smashing Saber Alter around like a ragdoll, landing multiple hits that would've been utterly fatal to her normally, which Alter withstands due to her infinite mana source letting her use her Mana Burst defensively to a truly absurd degree. Any fatalities she manages on him he simply shrugs off with his God Hand, but he ultimately cannot bridge the gap against a Servant that is normally limited by her Mana having an unending supply of it, and is unfortunately defeated by one point-blank Excalibur Morgan too many.
• Papa Wolf: Fiercely protective of Ilya far beyond what even a Servant would usually be. Even when she insulted him and blamed him for the extreme pains of summoning him before the Grail's surfacing, he came to her rescue when the Einzberns literally threw her to the wolves without hesitation and holds her hand in the aftermath to comfort her. He protects her with his own body from Gilgamesh's Storm of Blades. This may have something to do with how Hera made him kill his own children in life.
  Illya: "You didn't protect me because I told you to, or because you were a Servant. You did it because you wanted to... You're so strong, Berserker.
• Passing the Torch: In the manga, his final words are "Young me...I entrust this girl to you!" to Shirou, on Ilya. He does the same in Spring Song, telling Shirou to "protect her in my stead." after sparing Shirou from getting subjected to the Chunky Salsa Rule.
• Person of Mass Destruction: He's not as outright destructive as some of the other Servant's Noble Phantasm, but he's essentially a walking bulldozer with a massive ax-cleaver and the agility of a coked-up monkey, resulting in Scenery Gorn every time he fights.
• Power Born of Madness: The "Mad Enhancement" ability of the Berserker class increases all their stats in return for taking away their sanity and making them uncontrollable. Being that Berserker is Heracles, it's noted that the stat gains are likely minimal in comparison to the loss of at least one Noble Phantasm and the inability to fight tactically.
• Power of the God Hand: His Noble Phantasm (Well, the only one he can use anyway, due to his madness). A lot more "God," less "hand" than most examples.
• Protectorate: Do NOT mess with Illya.
• Punched Across the Room: Battling Berserker up close is not so much a swordfight as it is surviving him turning you into a human pinball.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: He has dark leathery skin and hair and red irises, and turns progressively red from a soft glow to a eye-searing crimson depending on how pissed off he is. After being Blackened by Aŋra Mainiiu in Heaven's Feel, he is blood-red with black vein-like markings.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: He has red irises and is one of the most powerful Servants. Archer outright warns Rin that he could probably take on the other six at once before they fight in the Ufotable anime.
• Required Secondary Powers: Inverted. If Herakles is summoned, he will have a Noble Phantasm representing the Twelve Labors, his arduous dozen tasks considered Beyond the Impossible even for other heroes of his time. Normally this would be in the form of King's Order, which gives Herakles Combo Platter Powers and tools he gathered during said Labors, but since he doesnt have the brain functions to utilize them as Berserker, he instead has God Hand, representing the immortality the Olympians gave him after his Labors.
• Restraining Bolt: Ilya herself acts as this for him, which says a lot about both how powerful she must be in order to keep freaking Heracles juiced up to the gills and how good-hearted Herakles is for letting a Tyke Bomb in need of protection and care direct him even at his own peril.
• Resurrective Immortality: His Noble Phantasm, God Hand, grants him twelve lives, requiring him to be killed twelve times. Provided his Master can provide him enough mana (Illya can), he can regain a lost life once a day until he has twelve again. However, extremely powerful attacks like Caliburn can destroy multiple lives.
• Sanity Has Advantages: Mad Enhancement increases his already enormous strength, but strips him of his considerable tactical acumen and his formidable hand-to-hand skills (he invented Pankration, and defeated Death with it) and mastery over weapons (his swordsmanship allows him to strike nine times from nine different directions at the same time. With his bow, he can shoot a single arrow and hit you one hundred times).
• Screaming Warrior: His attempts at vocalizing are completely incoherent and sound more like animal roars than something a human could produce.
• Semi-Divine: Divinity Rank A, the highest normally achievable rank, being the son of Zeus and having ascended to the Olympic pantheon as he died. Comes back to bite him back in Unlimited Blade Works where it allows Gilgamesh to restrain him with Enkidu and impale him with Gate of Babylon.
• The Speechless: While insane he only roars and the visual novel makes a point of emphasizing the wordlessness of his roars by always denoting them with "▂▂▃▃▄▄▅▅!". No "GRAAHH", no "RRAAARR", no any of the usual "stock" SFX for screaming/yelling/roaring. Just blank rectangles. He only speaks twice in the entire visual novel, when Saber kills him in the Fate route, and only for the half minute he has before his body completely vanishes and when he tells Illya to "Run" away from Dark Sakura in Heaven's Feel.
• Spell My Name With An S: Though most people use the more common Roman spelling of "Hercules", Berserker's name is pronounced in the Visual Novel like the original Greek name "Herakles".
• Square Race, Round Class: Ridiculously powerful though he might be, Berserker is probably the worst class he could have been summoned in. It magnifies his physical abilities, but that's not a big upgrade when you're already the World's Strongest Man, and Sanity Has Advantages: the actual Heracles was an omnidisciplinary Genius Bruiser with a downright ludicrous range of talents and incredibly powerful weaponry, but as a Berserker, he's just ungodly tough and hits things really hard. A flashback shows that after Saber and Kiritsugu betrayed the Einzberns' purposes for the Holy Grail in the 4th War, they stopped taking chances and instead summoned a mad pawn that couldn't turn on them.
• Stealthy Colossus: He's eligible to be summoned as Assassin, despite being roughly twice the height and 3 times the width of anyone else (though there is some implication that the Berserker class is, in addition to everything else, making him "hulk out" much more literally). However, his extremely clever use of trickery and ability to be stealthy when required to in his original legend makes this more than justified.
• Strong and Skilled: In the Ufotable adaptations, Berserker, while still an unthinking brute, retains his instinctual skill at combat and at least some degree of strategy beyond Attack! Attack! Attack!. Even if he's just swinging for the fences and beyond all the time, he's able to make use of Improvised Weapons in the form of pillars and entire castle sections in Lost Butterfly, and pulls off some absolutely disrespectful Capoeira-like kicks after casually ducking Saber's Counter-Attack after she disarmed him.
• Suddenly Voiced: He only speaks twice, once in the Fate route after Saber and Shirou deal him a lethal blow and in Heaven's Feel, when he tells Illya to run from Dark Sakura.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes: When he's calm, his natural eye color seems to be a dull gold, with slit pupils no less, signifying his divine heritage.
• Superpowered Evil Side:
  • The Mad Enhancement of the Berserker class augments Heracles' physical parameters, but physically warps him into a monstrous form and robs him of his sanity. It's the least-effective class for him to be summoned under, as his stats are already sky-high and he'd be a Genius Bruiser if sane; The class he'd excel the most in would be Archer. In the Unlimited Blade Works and Heaven's Feel anime adaptations he retains his combat skills despite not possessing Eternal Arms Mastership like his precursor from Fate/Zero.
  • Averted in Heaven's Feel, which sees Berserker taken by The Shadow like Saber, but Blackened Berserker is blind, lacks his Noble Phantasm, and his skin. He is also slower and weaker than regular Berserker. He's also not under control of the Shadow/Sakura but simply assumes Shirou is his enemy and is thus not considered a distinct character like Saber Alter.
• Super-Strength: In terms of raw physical strength, he's easily one of, if not the strongest Servant summonable in a normal Holy Grail War; This is the man who choked out several Greek Kaiju with ease and held the heavens on his shoulders. The narration says his blows can flatten mountains, and in one Bad End he's able to easily swat down a poorly charged Excalibur. Virtually all of his fights have his opponents getting tossed around like ragdolls from taking the brunt of his hits and Saber is completely overwhelmed by him in every route. Even with an infinite mana source, she takes an ungodly amount of punishment that would've killed anything else on earth a dozen times over.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: An adaptational case. In the visual novel, his fight against Saber Alter is downright pitiful, and he barely gets to put up token resistance despite his already established incredible power. Lost Butterfly gives him much more of a chance to shine even though he meets the same fate.
• Tragic Monster: In life he was The Paragon and a magnanimous Ideal Hero looked up to for generations, then millenia. As a Servant, he's reduced to the mad dog of a Tyke Bomb Magus.
• Undying Loyalty: Utterly protective of Illya even though she initially hated him, and is called a Servant completely satisfied with his Master by Archer. Even when prompted by Gilgamesh and told by him that he only stands a chance if he stops protecting Illya, Berserker stands his ground and defends her to the end, even managing to break out of Enkidu in the process despite it being seemingly impossible.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Being incapable of any strategy more complicated than Attack! Attack! Attack! usually doesn't matter when you can shatter entire buildings with a single blow and move faster than the human eye can follow. Interestingly, he is said to have completely inhuman levels of skill with all weapons if he was sane, far surpassing even Saber, but naturally, this is never shown.
  • Invoked, in a character profile that identifies this trait in-universe; Even if he was able to use his old skills, he'd never need to against a human being because he is just astronomically stronger than anything left on planet Earth when he's summoned.
    "Although he lacks technique, his abilities are so beyond normal standards in power and speed that there is no room for the idea in the first place. 'Technique' in battle is something invented by humans to compensate for their natural weaknesses, so such is unnecessary for he who possesses no such weakness."
• Unstoppable Rage: The only thing he really feels is rage.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: He wears a kilt and not much else, though the Berserker class leaves him deformed and insane, negating any fanservice value.
• The Worf Effect: He's a monstrously powerful Servant that takes a combined effort from Archer, Rin, Saber, and Shirou to defeat in the Fate route. In the other routes he falls to prove how dangerous Gilgamesh and the Shadow/Saber Alter are. Despite this, he never approaches Jobber status and always goes down swinging while exceeding his own sky-high limits, even getting within spitting distance of pulping Gilgamesh's head like an orange in Unlimited Blade Works.
  • Amazingly subverted in Heavens Feel 2: Lost Butterfly where he is initially easily beaten by Saber Alter only to burst out of the Grail Mud and give her an ass-beating that would've killed her a dozen times over without the Shadow's help and mana.
• Worf Had the Flu: By the time Shirou faces him in Heaven's Feel, Berserker is down to his last life, is blind, even more insane, and his skin is ripped off, all factors that made it easier for Shirou to finish him off with Nine Lives Blade Works (with the addition of Illya's presence preventing Berserker from attacking them further). Nasu later confirms in the Heaven's Feel 3: Spring Song Q&As that Berserker would've easily countered Shirou's onslaught even while insane if it weren't for those factors stopping him. Case and point, he still nearly cleaved Shirou in two with his last attack if Illya hadn't come out of hiding to make him stop mid-swing.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • In a very brief moment of lucidity during the Fate route while recovering from Archer wiping out six of his lives he wordlessly laments that the battle with him deserved better and that were he not Berserker he would have been delighted to exchange sword techniques to their hearts' content.
  • In Unlimited Blade Works, Gilgamesh acknowledges him as one right off the bat, well-aware of his fearsome strength and reputation, and his long-winded diatribe on Herakles' might that replaces any conversation the two of them could have had if Herakles was sane spells out that Gilgamesh is genuinely saddened that such a great foe, that without the turn of fate of being summoned in the modern day he would never have had the chance to fight, is reduced to, as Gilgamesh puts it, "playing nursemaid". The episode is even titled A Battle of Legend.
  Gilgamesh: "What an unbelievable man. To the very end, you surpassed your own legend..."
• Wrestler in All of Us: To be fair, chokeslams become very easy when you have hands large enough to encapsulate a man's torso. Saber Alter was on the receiving end of a full combo of them.
• Your Head Asplode: In Fate, Rin makes a gamble and lets him grab her so she can unload a bunch of jewels into his face all at once, which successfully blows the top half of his head off and leaves his lower jaw barely connected to his neck, taking one of his six remaining lives. Illya even admits that if Rin used maybe five times the amount of jewels, she could have taken all his remaining lives in that one strike.

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Caster

Voiced by: Atsuko Tanaka (JP), Tara Platt (EN 2006 Anime, 2010 Unlimited Blade Works Movie), Megan Hollingshead (EN 2015 Unlimited Blade Works Anime, 2018 Heaven's Feel Movie)

Caster with hood

^{Click here to see Caster without her hood}

"If the Holy Grail has infinite wealth, it should not run out no matter how much we split it. Then can you not share the Holy Grail with those you trust?"

A mysterious wizard operating out of the local temple. Caster is a heretic who has made a personal enemy out of Tohsaka due to her draining the townsfolk of mana and nearly killing them in the process. She is ruthless, talented and determined. Assassin guards the gate of her base of operations and is her Servant. Despite this, she shows a level of interest in all of the protagonists and desires to take Saber for her own.

Caster is one of the physically-weakest Servants and relies mostly on her powerful anti-Army magic, her Territory Creation skill and her skeletal golems when fighting her opponents. She does less well in single combat. Her true identity is Medea, a famous witch from the Greek era.

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• Accidental Murder: Her first attempts to siphon the energy from Fuyuki's people accidentally end up fatal for her first victims, as she never used this spell before and she couldn't control it at first. Later on, she only takes enough to not kill them, although in her anger, she poisons several men with hemlock, making them impotent.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • Her depictions in works that followed Fate/stay night, like Fate/hollow ataraxia and even Carnival Phantasm, have her character soften significantly.
  • Both played straight and subverted in the Unlimited blade Works anime. While she's shown to have a compassionate side (albeit briefly), as she destroyed the facility of her former Master and frees the children he was planning to sacrifice as fuel, she still serves as a major antagonist for most of the route and goes on to drain the mana and life-force from nearly everyone in the city. Her regression into a villain is likely due to her new found goal to stay with Kuzuki longer.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Her death at Gilgamesh's hands in the Fate route is so horrifyingly brutal that Shirou describes her death as a "tragedy".
• And I Must Scream: Let's just say, agreeing to Caster's proposals is a very bad idea. Getting trapped into a glass jar as her puppet is par for the course.
• Antagonist Abilities: A major aspect of her threat level, and deliberately Invoked on her part — while Caster has diverse magical powers, she has little chance against any of the other Servants in open combat due to her lackluster physical abilities. To that end, she does her best to even the playing field through any means necessary, including minions, traps, diversions, mystical surveillance, subverting the rules of the Grail War itself, and when all else fails, getting the hell out of dodge via Teleportation.
• Anti-Magic: Her Noble Phantasm, Rule Breaker. It can nullify every magical contract, including Master-Servant binding.
• Arc Villain: Of the first half of Unlimited Blade Works. Her defeat spells the point where Archer and Gilgamesh's own plans come to the forefront.
• Attempted Rape: In the Unlimited Blade Works route, Caster uses her magic to sexually torture Artoria in an attempt to break her. In the expanded DVD version of episode 13, she actually starts to feel her up.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Rule Breaker. You have a Noble Phantasm that can null any and all contracts, but it's a dagger meaning she has to get close to her opponent to use it when she has the physical defense of a wet paper bag.
  • The Golden Fleece. She could use it to summon the dragon that originally guarded the Fleece, which would make her mid-tier amongst the Fifth Grail War Servants, and not the weakest, along with Assassin. Unfortunately, while she knows the spell necessary to summon the dragon, she doesn't know the one that would let her control it, meaning it would be useless save as an attack animal on a powerful enemy like Berserker.
• Battle Couple: She does the high-speed spellcasting, her Master handles close-range physical combat and shields her.
• Beam Spam: In fights she simply spams instant A-rank spells from the sky, riddling the area with lasers that leave the ground scorched as if it had been bombed.
• Berserk Button: Calling her a witch is an amazingly easy way to piss her off.
• Big Bad Wannabe: She's practically the Shinji Matou amongst the Servants, albeit actually being a credible threat. All her schemes to win the Grail come undone in all the routes, with Fate having Gilgamesh just nuke her with his Storm of Blades when she tries to claim Saber (after he apparently attacked the Temple himself to kill Kuzuki and Assassin) and Heaven's Feel having her, Kuzuki and Assassin be killed by True Assassin as the first casualties. Unlimited Blade Works has her last the longest and get the furthest along in her goals only for her to become the Unwitting Pawn in Archer's own plans.
• Brains and Bondage: Being a Squishy Wizard, her attacks focus more on the mental than the physical, but that certainly doesn't stop her from enjoying seeing Saber tied up and tortured.
• Broken Bird: Her life as a mortal has left her fairly twisted. Her real identity is that of Medea, and people cursed her as a witch who would go so far as to kill her own brother to get what she wants. But that's not why she's half killing townspeople. She never did that in life.
• Bullying a Dragon: Mocks Archer by claiming that she's impossible for him to hit. She's eventually Impaled with Extreme Prejudice after he out-gambits her.
• Cape Wings: She can extend her cape to turn it into a giant pair of wings, which she mainly does when using her Rain of Light spell.
• Cheaters Never Prosper: Her Imperfect Ritual to summon Assassin has unforeseen consequences in the Heaven's Feel route when Zouken invokes an Obvious Rule Patch to properly summon an Assassin into the Holy Grail War. Assassin ends up completely overwritten by True Assassin right where he stands, and both Caster and her Master are slaughtered in turn.
• Combat Pragmatist: Seeing as she's one of the two weakest Servant classes, Caster is not above fighting dirty. She takes hostages, turns allies against each other, sends minions to distract people while she fulfills her goals and engages in some good old fashioned torture.
• Curtains Match the Window: Her hair and eyes share the same color.
• Death from Above: One of her favorite tactics is to Beam Spam anti-army class spells from overhead.
• Dem Bones: Makes use of skeletal animal Golems as scouts and cannon fodder. The same skeletal creatures that Jason had to contend with in the Greek myth that Caster/Medea originates from, at that.
• Depraved Bisexual: Caster manages to prove both aspects of the trope in one scene, as she gets aroused by magically torturing Saber into obedience (having put her in a revealing white dress) and contemplates exactly how far she can get Saber to be a slave to her lust. The DVD version of the Unlimited Blade Works anime shows her groping Saber before Kuzuki stops her from going any further. Nasu mentions in Fate/side material that a hypothetical "Caster" route would have had Caster seducing Rider before setting up a trap to stab her in the back.
• Disc-One Final Boss: In Unlimited Blade Works, she controls the game by taking over a number of Servants, but in the end she is defeated and the Gilgamesh-Kotomine duo take center stage.
• Does Not Like Men: She detests men by default thanks to her experiences with Jason in her past life as Medea, but she seems to have some measure of respect for Shirou's honesty. She's also motivated by her genuine love for her Master, Kuzuki.
• Doppelgänger Attack: She can create tangible copies of herself and others for remote combat or creating diversions, though it usually only takes one good hit to destroy them.
• Dramatic Irony: She thinks Kuzuki doesn't return her feelings. He does, he's just really bad at emotional expression.
• Driven to Madness:
  • In Fate, she abruptly attacks Shirou's house, intending to take Saber and kill everyone. Whatever happened with Kuzuki and Assassin is not known, except that the latter disappeared. hollow ataraxia actually reveals what happened. While Caster was away, Gilgamesh decided to visit the Ryuudou Temple and bombarded it with Gate of Babylon, killing both Assassin and Kuzuki. Kuzuki's death drove her mad and she decided to take as many Servants as she could with her before she disappeared. Unfortunately for her, Gilgamesh finishes his attacks after he starts them.
  • In Heaven's Feel, Saber finds her with a bloody Rule Breaker in her hands and Kuzuki's dead body right next to her. When Caster regains consciousness again, after seeing that she just killed the man she loves, she laughs and attacks Saber, very likely intending to die.
• Dropped a Bridge on Her: Is abruptly killed early into the Heavens Feel route by True Assassin, making her the second Servant to die in that route.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Truly loves Kuzuki and her goal is to be able to remain in the world with him.
• Even Evil Has Standards: While her character is aligned to Neutral Evil, using children as cattle to create mana gems is something she would never lower herself to do, unlike her first Master.
• The Faceless: When shown without her hood, she is only shown from behind, until she dies.
• Familiar: She herself is technically a familiar, but this is referring to the dragon tooth golems she uses. She also turns Shirou into a familiar in a bad end or two and has some Servants herself in Unlimited Blade Works.
• Flight: One of her spells and a central part of her skill in running away.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: While Caster is the weakest of the seven Servants in a straight-up fight, actually pinning her down to score a finishing blow is incredibly difficult due to her flight, teleportation, and Self-Duplication abilities. Pretty much the only ways to definitively beat her are to take her by complete surprise (as Archer did by pulling out a new technique during their duel at Ryuudou Temple, and how Rin ultimately defeats her in the Unlimited Blade Works route, by mixing martial arts into their Wizard Duel), or burying her under overwhelming firepower (per her death at Gilgamesh's hands in the Fate route).
• Godzilla Threshold: All of the frightening and destructive spells she uses during the story? She never used them in life. But she's so desperate to remain with Kuzuki and obtain the Grail that she's willing to go to any length to do it.
• Gorgeous Greek: Her true identity is the Greek witch Medea, and she's very attractive.
• Homoerotic Subtext: With the captured Saber. She really seems to enjoy dressing her up and in the expanded DVD version of the Unlimited Blade Works anime is shown molesting her as well. Fate/hollow ataraxia and Carnival Phantasm have a lot of fun with this one.
• Hot Witch: Without her hood, she is a beautiful spellcaster. Her true identity is Medea, the beautiful sorceress from Greek myth.
• Human Pincushion: Her ultimate fate in the Fate and Unlimited Blade Works routes, courtesy of Gilgamesh and Archer respectively.
• Image Song: "Sasoi" ("Temptation").
• Instant Runes: She can make 'em, easy. Her high-speed divine language skill means her spells take effect immediately, and no magus can replicate it as the language of the gods is lost in the present day.
• In the Hood: She keeps her face hidden within her hood 95% of the time, even when she's getting the crap kicked outta her.
• Kryptonite Is Everywhere: Caster unfortunately suffers from this. Although her spells are ludicrously strong and can easily vaporize a Servant with a single direct hit, more than half of her opponents in the war possess some kind of Magic Resistance that lets them almost if not completely No-Sell it, while Berserker can tank it with his Resurrective Immortality. Even Archer, whose Magic Resistance is low enough for her to affect him, is protected by his swords which do have enough resistance to deflect her spells.
• Lady of Black Magic: Beautiful and merciless, she creates skeletal-like golems and has a thing for torturing people though her magic.
• Laughing Mad: As Gilgamesh kills her in the Fate route she's reduced to madly laughing at the brutal death she is being subjected to.
• Load-Bearing Boss: In the anime, her elaborate temple turns out to have No Ontological Inertia. Saber and Tohsaka also agree that she'd totally blow up her base if beaten while in it.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Her first Master's Command Spell was used so she couldn't use Rule Breaker on him to escape their contract, so she used it on herself. This also works on other Servants.
  • Servants aren't supposed to be able to have Servants of their own, but Caster found a way to fudge the method by using the Greater Grail to give herself bootleg Command Seals for a bootleg Servant. Assassin was the result.
• Love Makes You Evil: While her love for her Master, Kuzuki, let her find a kind of happiness and peace she never enjoyed in life, it also made her desperate to prolong it, to the point of striking out against the protagonists and endangering the lives of innocent civilians in the city. In short, Love made her more selfish, and all the atrocities she committed were just a desperate attempt to prolong her time with her Master.
• Magical Incantation: While she can mostly avoid this thanks to being a true sorcerer from the age of the gods, she does have to verbally invoke her strongest spells. It's just that the language she uses to incant them (which is rendered in Ancient Greek) makes it take nowhere near as long as it would for a modern day magi to do so.
• Neutral Evil: In-Universe alignment. While Caster has lines she won't cross, she wants the Grail so she can stay materialized longer to be with her Master, who she has fallen in love with. To do so, she does anything she can to secure power, regardless of who she has to screw over to do so.
• One Hero, Hold the Weaksauce: By default, Servants have to hold themselves back in combat to some degree, as they are reliant on their Master's limited mana reserves to both utilize their own abilities and maintain their physical forms. Caster, on the other hand, has functionally unlimited mana thanks to mastering a spell that enables her to non-lethally drain mana from human beings around her, enabling her to spam her most powerful spells and attacks as frequently as she wants — as well as maintain some additional Servants of her own while still allowing them to function at full capacity, as seen with Assassin as well as Archer and Saber in the Unlimited Blade Works route.
• One to Million to One: Can teleport from place to place by dissolving into a swarm of glowing butterflies and reforming somewhere else. Her copies also dissolve this way when they're destroyed.
• Out-Gambitted: By Archer in Unlimited Blade Works. While she intended him to be a disposable pawn in her attempts to get the Grail, he ends up riddling her with swords while she's occupied with Rin.
• Pointed Ears: Without her hood, her ears are shown to be pointed and elf-like.
• Power Floats: She floats while in the temple as she receives special power within her lair.
• Pragmatic Villainy: In the UBW anime, she pointed out that her Master's methods of creating mana were inefficient. It took him six child sacrifices in a state-of-the-art laboratory to create a tiny mana crystal, when she could create one several times larger with barely any effort at all.
• Properly Paranoid: When she takes Archer as her Servant in Unlimited Blade Works she knows that he's someone not to be trusted and posts him far away from her as precaution. Unfortunately it's impossible to keep an eye on him 24/7 and he riddles her with his swords the moment she's distracted.
• Rescue Romance: A villainous example with her Master Kuzuki. Caster was originally summoned by a magus from the Mage's Association, but she killed him with Rule Breaker. On the verge of her spiritual body dissipating, she stumbled upon Souichirou Kuzuki at the foot of the Ryuudou Temple. He then brought Caster into the temple and attended to her recovery. While initially planning to use him as a puppet, she instead quickly fell in love.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Archer notes she is particularly skilled in running away.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: She fell in love with Kuzuki because he was the first man to show her genuine kindness, dedication and loyalty.
• Smug Snake: Subverted. While she acts like a Smug Snake, she knows what she is doing is wrong and doubts that it will actually work out. Her one interlude even reveals that the forbidden magic she's using is something she would normally never use if she wasn't so desperate to stay with Kuzuki.
• Squishy Wizard: Caster has incredible magical power, with spells that rank in both power and diversity head-and-shoulders above any of the mortal magi in the story. However, she lacks the superhuman strength, speed, and toughness possessed to varying degrees by all of the other Servants, meaning that any kind of physical confrontation is equivalent to suicide for her. Exploiting this weakness is how Rin wins their Wizard Duel in Unlimited Blade Works — unlike Caster, Rin is trained in martial arts, and isn't afraid to incorporate Strengthening magecraft and a good old-fashioned physical smackdown into a battle of magic.
• Super-Empowering: Her use of Reinforcement magic on Kuzuki, making him strong enough to shatter blades with his bare hands and deliver blows that hurt even the toughest of Servants. Combined with his unique fighting style, Caster's magic makes Kuzuki roughly as dangerous as a Servant in his own right. Unlike other mortal users of Reinforcement, she can maintain the effects at a distance and with seemingly no effort or concentration.
• Taking the Bullet: How she meets her end in the Unlimited Blade Works route, intercepting a barrage of swords fired by Archer meant for Kuzuki. It's a Senseless Sacrifice in the end, as Kuzuki attacks Archer to avenge her death and gets cut down all the same.
• Tragic Villain: Despite being an antagonist in every route, all she really wants is to be with the man she loves.
• Unholy Matrimony: She genuinely loves her Master and together they form an evil duo. Judging by his actions and hollow ataraxia, her feelings are reciprocated.
• Unwitting Pawn: Archer joined her in Unlimited Blade Works for one reason only; to get rid of Rin's Command Seal that prevents him from hurting Shirou. Once the Seal was removed Caster was nothing more than an inconvenient loose end to be tied up before he could pursue his personal agenda. To Caster's credit she knows that Archer isn't to be trusted but she bit off more than she could chew.
• Villain Respect: Initially has a firm Puny Humans stance, but eventually starts to express interest in Shirou's bravery and unique magical skills, and also develops a degree of admiration for Rin's cunning after their first duel at Kirei's church in the Unlimited Blade Works route.
• Weak, but Skilled: The Caster class is usually considered the weakest of the seven Servant classes due to their overreliance on magic and the fact that out of the six remaining classes, four have natural magic resistance. Nonetheless, Caster still manages to be a very dangerous antagonist thanks to her cunning and resourcefulness, as well as having some of the most powerful magical skills and attacks due to being a Servant summoned from the Age of Gods. If serious, she can give Touko or even Aoko Aozaki a very difficult fight. Fate/Grand Order later states that Medea is one of the top five most skilled magi to have ever lived.
• We Can Rule Together: She tries to recruit Shirou and Archer to her side during "Unlimited Blade Works. For Shirou, agreeing is not a good idea. Archer declines after concluding it's not necessary for him to win. He later takes the offer, but he only does this so the Command Spell from Rin which prevents him from attacking Shirou can be nullified.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: The whole "killing her kids to spite her unfaithful husband" thing didn't happen in this universe, and every other evil thing she did was the result of having been driven mad with a love forced upon her by Aphrodite. In the modern day when presented with her original Master's means of producing powerful magic gemstones, she calmly gives him an alternative that requires no killing. When he doesn't listen, she destroys the entire sacrificial chamber and kills the staff, but lets the would-be human sacrifices go unharmed.

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Assassin

Voiced by: Shin-ichiro Miki (JP), David Vincent (EN 2006 Anime, 2010 Unlimited Blade Works Movie), Todd Haberkorn (EN 2015 Unlimited Blade Works Anime, 2018 Heaven's Feel Movie)

"My role is to guard this gate. I won't let you through alive, nor shall I let you out alive."

A Servant summoned by Caster to guard the gate of the Ryuudou Temple. Assassin is a solemn character who delights nothing more than having a good fight. As a result of being summoned by another Servant he is, however, an incomplete or fake Servant, thus he is linked with the gate and cannot travel further than the areas in the vicinity of the gate.

Assassin freely identifies himself to any opponent as the legendary swordsman Sasaki Kojiro. He is very different from normal Servants, and as such doesn't really have a Noble Phantasm. The closest thing that could be called his Noble Phantasm is Monohoshi Zao (lit. The Laundry-Drying Pole, a derogatory nickname that almost literally means "Really damn long sword"), a simple nodachi, and his ultimate technique, Hiken Tsubame Gaeshi (lit. Swallow Reversal Technique), a sword technique that allows him to strike multiple points at the same moment.

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• Absurdly Sharp Blade: His sword can cut falling leaves in half just by holding the blade in their path, and slice cleanly through Saber's armor — all the more noteable because it's not a Noble Phantasm, just a mundane sword wielded in his immensely-skilled hands.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Tsubame Gaeshi is a technique that approaches True Magic, but he himself claims it's just a sword trick he practiced a lot.
• Affably Evil: Even if he's somewhat snarky, he's always polite and has respect for his opponent. This is taken almost to extremes when he openly introduces himself to Saber (revealing your identity often lets opponents gain an advantage just by knowing what your history was) and when Saber realizes she's forced to reply due to knightly honor he stops her from doing so affirming that he only did it as a courtesy, not as a way to influence the fight.
  
  The reason he is listed as evil is actually due to his own beliefs that anyone who takes a life is evil, and so as someone who had done so, he can only see himself as evil. He is closer to Lawful Neutral in actual practice, fulfilling his duty as he can and holds his honor and values close to his heart, though as seen below, he is still very willing to stab someone in the back if they offend him or his sensibilities.
• Anti-Villain: He's a villain because he works for Caster. That's about it.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: He was able to tell exactly how long Saber's invisible sword was just by observing how she was holding it and feeling the wind from her sword swings. For comparison's sake, the previous Lancer only achieved the same feat by using a Noble Phantasm that ripped the invisibility away.
• Badass Normal: Or at least the closest thing to it among the Servants. Although he has superhuman physical abilities, his "noble phantasm" is just a really advanced sword technique reached through pure skill rather than any magic. Stated to be a nameless samurai who is similar to the Sasaki Kojiro of legend, he developed an ultimate technique on par with an anti-personnel Noble Phantasm simply by practicing. And with his lack of a proper Noble Phantasm, he nearly manages to defeat Saber in a sword fight twice. He also somehow managed to fend off all the other Servants as well offscreen, even Berserker somehow.
• Beyond the Impossible: His Tsubame Gaeshi technique is just absurd in-universe as it is outside of it. In the Nasuverse, the Second Magic is able to traverse the dimensional barrier. Assassin does this by swinging his sword three times in one swing from three different angles, defying all logic, as he has absolutely zero magical prowess.
• BFS: His Monohoshizao is 150 cm long and the name translates to "Laundry Drying Pole," mocking just how absurdly long it is. No one else could have wielded it but him because of how impractical it is.
• Blood Knight: Assassin has no wish and probably could not get one even if he tried. All he has is the satisfaction he gets from fighting a Worthy Opponent.
• Charles Atlas Superpower: Tsubame Gaeshi. While acknowledging that cutting a swallow out of the air would be impossible, he just kept practicing and he eventually got it to work. The final version of the technique somehow intruded into the territory of not magecraft but actual dimensional distortion magic.
• Composite Character: Assassin is the person closest to the being known as Sasaki Kojiro. This makes him a combination of three people: he's a samurai who could perform Tsubame Gaeshi, he has that name, and finally he wields Monohoshizao. In the Nasuverse, these were attributes of three different people.
• Determinator: In his past life, he kept swinging his sword to hit a swallow, even though it was supposedly futile, until he actually managed to do it.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: In Heaven's Feel Assassin dies almost instantly with no impact on the storyline as True Assassin is summoned. As an improperly-summoned Servant to start with, and a being closer to a Phantom than a Heroic Spirit, he didn't have even a ghost of a chance against True Assassin, who simply emerged from his body.
• Dying Smirk: In Heaven's Feel he's being devoured from the inside and smiling is his way of showing contempt for his killer and going out with dignity.
• Enlightenment Superpowers: Invoked in the form of his personal skill, Vitrification. It is a mental state acquired after reaching the pinnacle of arduous training. With this ability, Kojiro is able to maintain a cool and collected heart, regardless the situation as such he will never be overwhelmed by his emotion. This skill also gives him immunity to all sorts of magic and effects that target his mind. In simpler terms, he is immune to Mind Rape.
• Exact Words: Pulls this twice on Archer in rapid succession during Unlimited Blade Works. First, Assassin tells him that since he told Saber and Shirou to leave, he won't let Archer stop them from doing so. Second, he reminds Archer that as the protector of the gate, he won't let anyone enter or exit, attacking him.
• Extreme Doormat: Beyond his desire to duel Saber, he has practically no drives or desires of his own. He allows his Master to walk over him and tear him apart for making fun of her, and seems to treat his life as expendable.
• Face Death with Dignity: A big-time believer in this trope. He may disappear, but he will have an honorable duel with the ultimate swordsman first.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Quite literally. Assassin, unlike the other Servants, is physically incapable of winning the Holy Grail War: Even if all the other Servants killed each other off he'd be unable to move from his summoning spot and reach the location of the Grail — never mind that it wouldn't respond to him without his Master.
• Flynning: Averted. Just like real-life Japanese swords, his sword chips and breaks much easier than Western swords, especially magic ones like Excalibur. This ultimately leads to his defeat in Unlimited Blade Works when he chooses to block an attack instead of parrying, as his opponent had other things she needed to be doing. Since he didn't have much time to live he didn't care if he won or lost.
• Friendly Enemy: Mainly towards Saber. He respects her and wishes nothing more than to duel her, bearing no malice. He even warns her that somebody is watching their duel and helps her get away with Shirou when Archer is trying to kill her Master.
• The Gadfly: Only around Caster. He likes teasing her with snarky remarks, since he isn't very fond of her manipulation and backhanded tricks. It really pisses her off.
• Glass Cannon: His defining sword technique is an instant kill attack if all three blows land. On the defensive side he has no armor, an "E" rating in toughness, and dies more or less instantly if struck even once by another Servant. Compared to regular humans he's still rather resilient, though.
• Go Out with a Smile: He does so in the anime version of Fate and Unlimited Blade Works, having fulfilled his wish of having a climactic battle with Saber.
• Graceful Loser: In the anime version of Fate and Unlimited Blade Works. He got his wish of having a fight with Saber, the outcome didn't matter to him.
• Handsome Lech: To the point of flirting while battling, even though he later admits that he isn't very lucky with the ladies.
• Home Field Advantage: While Assassin is in pure strength weaker than most Servants, he can keep up with them since not only are all Servants slightly weakened while inside Caster's territory, he is blocking the only possible entrance to the Ryuudou Temple and can use the fact that he is standing above his opponents to his advantage. The only problem is that the steps do not allow him to perfectly execute his instant-kill technique, but since he only has to drive off the enemy, he is a very frustrating opponent to deal with.
• I Let You Win: In a sense in his second fight with Saber in Unlimited Blade Works. He intentionally makes a bad move where he blocks one of her strikes instead of parrying it which costs him the fight. He knew she needed to reach Rin and Shirou, so he made a move to insure the fight would end sooner. He didn't have much time to live so he didn't care if he won or lost.
• Imperfect Ritual: Caster summoned him by cobbling together some fake Command Seals using the Holy Grail. While this resulted in a stunted iteration of a Servant that needs more mana than normal and is bound to the Ryuudou Temple gate he was summoned at, this is of little concern to Caster as all she needed was a guardian for the Temple.
• Implausible Fencing Powers: Even more so than Saber by performing abstract combinations of attacks with a sword taller than most of the characters in the game. Taken to absurd levels with the previously mentioned Tsubame Gaeshi, where he breaks the laws of physics by attacking from three different angles in a single swing.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Nope. Assassin's sword is not some legendary Noble Phantasm, it's a cheapo sword that happens to be long. The blade gets damaged when he's forced to meet Saber's sword head on, creating a weakness in Tsubame Gaeshi's normally inescapable strikes.
• Killed Offscreen: In the Visual Novel's version of Fate, he is no longer seen after his initial encounter with Saber. During Caster's ambush, she mentions that Assassin is already dead. hollow ataraxia reveals that it was Gilgamesh who destroyed the Ryuudou Temple, killing Assassin and Kuzuki in the process and driving Caster mad. Averted in the anime version, which instead borrows his and Saber's final duel from the UBW route.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen:
  • In Fate, he calls off his fight with Saber, because he does not wish for outsiders to observe his fight with her to learn her identity. The observer is Rider, who was sent by Shinji to kill or at least lead Shirou to Caster so she can kill him, which does happen in a Bad End.
  • In Unlimited Blade Works, he calls off his first fight against Saber, due to a wounded Shirou being pursued by Archer stumbling into the middle of their fight.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: He has very long blue hair, and is almost effeminate in appearance.
• Major Injury Underreaction: He still manages to snark at Caster even as his ribcage was ripped open by her when she was annoyed one too many times.
• Master Swordsman: He's even better than Saber, who is supposedly the strongest of the Saber class, and can outfight her even though she's superior to him in every other attribute like speed and strength simply because he is that skilled, along with the terrain advantage. He's probably one of the two best swordsmasters in the entire franchise considering his ultimate technique breaks reality, with only Miyamoto Musashi capable of matching him in skill and countering Tsubame Gaeshi blow-for-blow.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: During their first duel, Saber comments that he is surprisingly strong for such a skinny guy.
• Nested Ownership: He was summoned by another Servant.
• Neutral Evil: In-universe alignment.
• Never Learned to Read: His backstory says that since in life he was a simple Japanese farmer turned swordsman, he never learned to read and write.
• Noble Demon: He seems to be okay with his evil image, but when he makes a deal he sticks to it and even defends apparent enemies against those who would interfere with the deal.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: According to the Character Materials he fought Berserker to a standstill. The same Berserker he's physically incapable of hurting, which according to invokedNasu is proof that "Whoa, Assassin's amazing."
• Samurai: Sasaki Kojiro is supposed to be the archenemy to Miyamoto Musashi, complete with the samurai robe, katana and samurai hair.
• Samurai Ponytail: Assassin has very polite speech patterns, if a bit flirty. Similarly, his long hair matches his samurai outlook emphasizing grace.
• Sarcastic Devotee: Assassin doesn't particularly like his Master and makes no attempt at hiding this.
• Simultaneous Blade Spam: Before he became Servant Assassin, he created Tsubame Gaeshi, a sword technique that twists dimensions so that he can strike from three directions at the same time. He did this by... swinging his sword. A lot. And kept doing with utter determination until reality essentially gave up and granted him what he wanted, via partial access to "multi-dimension refraction phenomenon", also known as the Second Sorcery. This makes it an instant win condition since it's obviously impossible for someone with two arms to guard three directions at the same time, unless they're Berserker whose Noble Phantasm lets him laugh off such feeble attacks.
• Spirited Competitor: Assassin seems to relish the act of competing with Saber more than he does the actual act of battle itself. Dueling people he doesn't consider worthy competitors, like Archer, offers him no enjoyment even if they're quite good.
• Square Race, Round Class: If you actually look at his tactics and legend, he seems a lot more like a Saber than an Assassin; standing guard at a gate and fighting a powerful opponent head-to-head in the open isn't a very Assassin-like strategy. He should probably be a Saber, but the Grail purposely brought someone unqualified for the assassin class as part of Caster's punishment for violating the rules.
• The Starscream: Don't let his calm demeanor and Extreme Doormat status fool you. Given the right situation, he would try (and at one time succeed) to kill Caster, not because he wants to usurp her, but because he dislikes her. It seems that his Neutral Evil alignment is not wrong after all. Unlimited Blade Works shows that he used his duel with Saber as an excuse to let Archer into the Ryuudou Temple, so that Archer can give that 'vixen' a scare.
• Unusual Eyebrows: For some reason, his eyebrows fork.
• Villainous Rescue: In Unlimited Blade Works, Assassin holds off Archer to give Saber a chance to escape the Ryuudou Temple with Shirou.
• Weak, but Skilled: The most extreme example amongst Servants. He still has far above human strength or agility, but all that actually makes him a threat is his inhuman skill. His physical stats are close to bottom-barrel for a Servant (not helped by the fact the Assassin class isn't normally suited for direct combat) and he has no true Noble Phantasm, but his advanced swordsmanship prevent anyone from outmatching him with their greater physique and his most advanced sword technique practically defies reality in a way that it can be deemed on par with an anti-personnel Noble Phantasm.
• Worthy Opponent: He thinks very highly of Saber and relishes any chance to fight her. He even gives away his identity when he first meets her, which is a big no-no among servants and refuses to allow her to do the same.
• Wrecked Weapon: Blocking Saber's sword causes his sword to slightly bend, which creates a blind spot in his Tsubame Gaeshi technique that allows Saber to dodge it and strike him down.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Having been summoned into the world without a Master granting him mana and only a limited supply by Caster, Assassin is slowly wasting away and fully aware of it. In UBW he actually manages to stick around for quite a while despite Caster being dead. It's implied that he was reaching his limit anyway when Saber finally killed him.

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True Assassin (Major Unmarked Heaven's Feel Spoilers)

Voiced by: Tetsu Inada (JP), Patrick Seitz (EN)

"It looks like your weapon is a projectile weapon as well. Would you like to try a match?"

An Assassin-class Servant who was meant to be summoned for the Fuyuki Holy Grail War, but was denied because Caster broke the rules and called in her own Assassin. He is only summoned in Heaven's Feel by Shinji and Sakura's grandfather Zouken Matou in order to take the Holy Grail for themselves and grant their shared desire for eternal life.

Like all Assassins, he is a master of moving about undetected and prefers to fight using thrown knives. His Noble Phantasm is a curse known as Zabaniya: Delusional Heartbeat.

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• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Only at first, when he was still unstable. After devouring Lancer he begins talking normally.
• Affably Evil: While he looks Obviously Evil, he's not that bad.
• Badass Longrobe: He wears a tattered black one on a few scenes.
• Beat Still, My Heart: His Noble Phantasm works by cursing the enemy's heart, allowing True Assassin to make a perfect replica in his cursed right arm. He can then crush the fake heart, destroying the enemy's real heart; though this can be resisted with enough magic resistance. However, his cursed arm can bypass this by extending to great lengths in order to touch the enemy's body and replace the real heart with the fake, allowing him to devour the enemy's heart to boost his intelligence.
• The Blank: When Dark Sakura decides to kill him, she removes his mask to see what his face looks like. He had no face at all. That said, his debut appearance in Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel shows him eating by removing his mask, which exhibits that he at least has sunken cheeks, a really narrow jawline, plus rotting teeth and gums like the Mouth of Sauron.
• Cannibalism Superpower: He becomes stronger and increases his intelligence by eating other Servants' hearts.
• Chest Burster: When Zouken summons him in Heaven's Feel, he materializes inside Assassin's body and gruesomely tears his way out of his chest, killing him.
• Combat Pragmatist: Due to his relatively low parameters, he does whatever he can to win. Best exemplified in the animated adaptations that feature him shamelessly fighting alongside the Shadow to neutralise Lancer and Saber.
• Creepily Long Arms: Already Lean and Mean in general with the proportions of an orangutan, his wrapped-up Zabaniya arm has at least three elbows and can painfully extend like a whip, and he only needs to tap you on the chest with it to pull out your heart.
• Dark Is Evil: Played with, and arguably subverted in the long run. Sure, True Assassin works for the most horrifying, frightening character in the entire work and does his bidding without complaint... but it's made rather blunt that he's a Punch-Clock Villain. He doesn't follow Zouken out of any real love for Zouken or alignment with his goals; he follows Zouken because Zouken is his Master, and he kills because killing is his job. Compared to someone like Gilgamesh, he may as well be a saint.
• Determinator: All things considered, having been once the leader of Religious Bruiser Professional Killers who lived in the mountains in a desert during a time of war and extreme famine, True Assassin respects someone with an unbreakable will to survive most of all. If any, his distaste for Zouken's methods is balanced by his respect for the old geezer's endurance and determination.
• Dissonant Serenity: Despite his very scary appearance and being a Professional Killer so legendary that the very word "Assassin" comes from your order, Assassin is remarkably soft-spoken and polite, only raises his voice when things start going sour.
• The Dragon: He's Zouken's Servant, assisting him in his schemes and acting to defeat the others Masters and obtain the Holy Grail.
• Even Evil Has Standards: He doesn't really approve of some of his Master's crueller actions, but he also knows his place.
• Evil Duo: He and Zouken team up because they both want some form of immortality
• Flechette Storm: His go-to way of assassination is the forty or so throwing knives he carries around with him, which he can throw with the speed a small-arms handgun fires bullets at, only the bullets are much bigger and sharper. If his target can block them, he'll save the last few for an Unblockable Attack by combining the throw with immediately activating his Noble Phantasm.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Increases his intelligence by eating other Servants' hearts.
• Infinite Supplies: Averted. Assassin has to manually create new Dirks and only carries around forty at a time. After a battle, he will meticulously go around and pick up the ones that weren't destroyed, as it's considerably easier than making new ones and destroys evidence that he was there.
• Invisibility: His Presence Concealment skill does exactly what it says, allowing him to go near-totally undetected by others. That includes passing through the boundary field around Shirou's house.
• The Killer Becomes the Killed: Dark Sakura kills him for attacking Shirou twice. In her head, she's the only one that gets to harm him.
• Kryptonite-Proof Suit: Assassin has a high rank in "Protection from Wind", an enchantment he got in life to counteract sandstorms and Jinns. This gives him immunity to Saber's Invisible Air.
• Large and in Charge: One of the leaders of the vaunted Hashshashin order, and one of the tallest to ever hold the title of "Old Man of the Mountain."
• Lawful Evil: In-universe alignment. He's a contract killer, but he's not some Psycho for Hire sadist. He's a religious man following the rules of both his order, and his summons in the Grail War.
• Legacy Immortality: According to True Assassin's back-story, anyone who becomes leader of the Hashashin takes on the name and persona of Hassan-i-Sabbah. Thus, the True Assassin Heroic Spirit is a compound being made up from the deeds of all the Hassan-i-Sabbahs. Fate/Grand Order expands upon this idea, and the backstory of this particular Hassan considerably, but between his odd summoning and GO technically being a different facet of the Kaleidoscope, it's unclear how much of it is meant to be directly back-ported to F/SN, if any.
• Mercy Kill: In one of the last Bad ends, True Assassin kills Shirou after he catches him trying to infiltrate the Einzbern Castle, stating that it's far better to die by his hand than at Dark Sakura's. If you have encountered any of those bad endings so far, you'll agree.
• One-Hit Kill: His Noble Phantasm destroys the opponent's heart, killing them instantly. Doesn't work well against targets with high magic resistance or those with superhuman constitutions who can survive losing their heart, even temporarily.
• Out of Focus: Considering how he and Assassin cannot exist together at the same time and him being the Servant of the very unpleasant Zouken, True Assassin very rarely appears alongside other Fate/stay night cast. Pretty much the only work he shares spotlight with others is in Fate/tiger colosseum. He does have a chance to have his spotlight outside of Fate/stay night related works, however.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: His knife-tossing skills are impressive, but many of his opponents have either the "Protection from Arrows" skill or powerful battle instincts that let them foresee the projectile's path and block. His stealth is potent enough to fool magical barriers, but Saber's Instinct passively overrides it. And his trump card flops because he has the bad luck to run up against foes that have the magic resistance or weird constitution to No-Sell it. Frankly, even Lancer should've been able to no-sell Zabaniya for a bit thanks to Battle Continuation, but he had the bad fortune of landing right in the tentacles of The Shadow while recovering from the shock. It's a testament to his lethality that he comes across as menacing as he does considering the sheer bad luck he has in his matchups all game.
• Red Right Hand: He has jet-black skin, is skeletally thin, and has a skull mask sewn to his face. He also has a very-literal one under those wrappings. They come off when he uses his Finishing Move.
• Scary Black Man: Averted. While he displays many features common to the trope, it's made clear that Assassin's jet-black skin is not natural, and all but stated to be a sort of body modification members of his order undergo to better hide in the shadows.
• The Speechless: During the few hours after he is summoned, he speaks essentially in screeches.
• Stealth Expert: The whole point of "Presence Concealment" ability, which allows the Assassin class to remain undetected when spying or preparing an ambush. True Assassin is particularly skilled in this accord, being even capable to sneak into Shirou's house without alerting any of its other occupants or triggering the bounded field that serves as a perimeter alarm.
• Tragic Villain: Only expanded upon in Fate/Grand Order: He gave up a happy life with his family to become a Hassan, defacing himself and cutting off one of his own arm's to attach a Demon's instead, and... became another anonymous leader of a cult of assassins whose name did not ring throughout the annals of history more than any of the ones before or after him. No fame, no glory, no fortune, at the cost of all he ever held dear.
• Weak, but Skilled: His stats on paper mark him as one of the weakest Servants in the Grail War; the only things that puts him above Caster is his powerful Noble Phantasm and stealth skills. In fact, Lancer would easily kill him in a fair fight, but Assassin takes advantage of every dirty advantage possible until he can go for the kill with his Noble Phantasm, which is strong enough that it could kill a good number of the Servants he encounters.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: He asks Zouken this exact question when the latter is amusing himself by watching Shirou and Rin's futile attempts to find a solution to the predicament involving the "Shadow" consuming people left and right. Zouken replies that it would be more fun to let Sakura's Superpowered Evil Side do the job for them. Although Zouken is lying, he actually needs Shirou and Rin to break Sakura completely.

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The Shadow (Major Unmarked Heaven's Feel Spoilers)

IT IS NOT ENOUGH

The Shadow is a horrifying pseudo-Servant tied to Zouken Matou that appears in Heaven's Feel. It devours anything that it can, though its source and origins are enigmatic. It does not seem to be a truly sapient being and is instead ruled by its hunger.

The Shadow is a particularly spoilery entry in the story, so beware.

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• Adaptational Wimp: While still a threat the Heaven's Feel movies make it noticeably weaker by having Saber, Berserker, and Archer be able resist being corrupted by it, with the former two needed to be forced into it by True Assassin and Saber Alter respectively for them to actually be corrupted by it and the latter being effectively immune to it due to being a Counter Guardian.
• Almighty Idiot: The Shadow is purpose-driven, but calling it intelligent and not just a ball of instincts with severe magical hunger pangs is probably putting it nicely.
• Animal Motifs: It is likened to some sort of deep sea creature by Shirou, most likely a squid or the Giant Phantom Jelly (also known under the Latin name Stygiomedusa), the latter of which it greatly resembles in it's shape and movement. Even invoked somewhat when Lancer discovers it hiding in the lake of Ryoudou Temple and is eaten by it after being wounded by True Assassin.
• Anti-Magic: Mana Drain variety: The Shadow absorbs all mana in anything it comes into contact with, which makes Servants completely useless against it. The drain is so powerful that it ate through Lancer's runic barrier, a spell on level with Caster-class Noble Phantasms, in about 4 seconds. The resemblance to the Matou family magic (which also specializes in draining mana) is not a coincidence.''
• Arch-Enemy: For reasons unknown, this thing absolutely hates Rin. Just seeing her sends it into a frenzy, and it'll drop everything it's doing just to kill her. It's actually an expression of Sakura's resentment towards her sister corrupted by Aŋra Mainiiu's hatred for humanity.
• Assimilation Backfire: Is nearly devoured itself when it attacks Gilgamesh in Heaven's Feel. This is why you don't see him corrupted: The Shadow had to break him down quickly instead of corrupting him.
• The Assimilator: Can devour Servants and instead of breaking them down turn them into its own defenders.
• Ax-Crazy: The Shadow is directed by a combination of Sakura's subconscious and Aŋra Mainiiu's eternal hatred and is thus on a rampage with no way to reason with it.
• Captured Super-Entity: While it is an almost mindless monster, Zouken is able to direct it to some extent, but only somewhat. It is an imperfect manifestation of Aŋra Mainiiu, which he manipulates a little by using the Crest Worm in Sakura, but it nearly kills him early on.
• Casting a Shadow: It blankets the ground in shadows and black ooze that attempt to devour anything they touch.
• Confusion Fu: Part of what makes fighting it so dangerous is its unpredictable, alien fighting ways of attacking potential prey. No two attacks will ever be the same, but you can bet your ass that they will be absolutely horrifying and frighteningly hard to figure out despite being an Almighty Idiot.
• The Corruption: It corrupts the already fragile psyche and emotions of its host. Said host is Sakura, ultimately causing her to consciously accept the corruption after killing her brother in self-defense, turning her into Dark Sakura and gaining conscious control of its immense power at the cost of her sanity.
• Dark Is Evil: Is a darkness-based Eldritch Abomination.
• Demonic Possession: It is the result of Aŋra Mainiiu possessing Sakura Matou through the shards of the Grail in her body, initially taking over her while she sleeps and gaining increasing amounts of influence over her. Consciously accepting All the World's Evil causes her to transform into Dark Sakura.
• The Dreaded: It becomes this in Heaven's Feel, as it quickly becomes obvious that it is a threat far beyond the actual Grail War. Any encounter with it also comes with bone-deep terror for our heroes, as it soon becomes obvious it's far too alien for them to fight and difficult to even escape from. Later materials would reveal that entities like the Shadow are either fought with seven "Grand Servants", Servants which are Heroic Spirits meticulously summoned into empowered vessels of their absolute best Class, similar to seven World-manifested Counter Guardians. Team Shirou consists of some scared, confused teenagers and a handful of bog-standard Servants that weren't summoned particularly well, and so they largely don't have a prayer of fighting it in this form.
• Eldritch Abomination: It is an incomplete manifestation of Aŋra Mainiiu, who was once summoned as the evil Heroic Spirit Avenger but has since become the embodiment of All the World's Evil and is the being corrupting the Greater Grail, using Sakura Matou's body as a medium. Later sequels, such as Grand Order, would expound further on entities like Aŋra Mainiiu, but for F/SN's purposes it's enough to know that most individual Servants are virtually helpless against an entity like the Shadow, and only someone on Gilgamesh's level even has a prayer alone (and a mere moment of carelessness is all the Shadow needs to defeat even him).
• Eviler than Thou: Kills off Gilgamesh when he let his guard down while trying to kill Sakura, who is subconsciously giving it a way into the world.
• Fantastic Nuke: In an attempt to kill Rin, it sucks up an enormous amount of mana from its surroundings and lets it all out in an explosion so powerful that it powers through Archer's Rho Aias and leaves a massive crater in the forest.
• Fetus Terrible: The Shadow, given a chance to grow and merge with Sakura, eventually becomes the "embryo" of Aŋra Mainiiu, the source of the Grail's corruption itself. It has no mind yet and, therefore, no sense of morality, but it has the potential to be born as a Beast of Retribution, which would cause untold devastation.
• Fighting a Shadow: Besides the obvious, this is the main reason why it's normally impossible to defeat. The Shadow is Aŋra Mainiiu using Sakura to project itself into the world, allowing it to use her abilities. Destroying the Shadow means nothing if the host remains unharmed, which is why Gilgamesh cuts to the chase and targets her when he gets fed up with its rampage.
• The Heavy: In Heaven's Feel. Its unstoppable power and increasingly deadly attacks on the people of Fuyuki serve as the preeminent source of conflict for most of the plot.
• Hero Killer: The Shadow is more of a force of nature than an antagonist, so it's pointless to try to fight it.
• Horror Hunger: The Shadow feels as though it is constantly starving and begins absorbing hundreds of townspeople and several Servants in an attempt to sate itself.
• Invincible Villain: The Shadow is impossible to fight due to it melting and devouring anything that comes close. Gilgamesh nearly destroys it by attacking the host directly, but lets his guard down in the last second and gets eaten for his trouble. Sakura is still a mangled mess afterward, saved only by the near-instant regenerative properties Aŋra possesses as a (former) Servant with access to vast quantities of mana.
• Knight of Cerebus: When the Shadow appears, the story takes a definite turn for the darker, especially when it eats Saber herself.
• Living Shadow: It can manifest itself from its host's shadow.
• Made of Evil: It is a manifestation of All The World's Evil.
• Mind Rape: Coming into contact with The Shadow causes the unfortunate soul's mind to be flooded with pure, concentrated madness and hatred before being eaten alive. Not even Servants are immune (though those with incredible power of will like Herakles and Gilgamesh can resist it). Shirou only avoids death because the Shadow is powered by Sakura's subconscious. About a fourth of the entire visual novel's Bad Ends are dedicated to showing just how horrifying it is.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: By mortally injuring Archer and tearing Shirou's left arm off, it inadvertently gives Shirou the means, namely Archer's arm, to defeat Berserker, Saber and ultimately sever its contact with Sakura.
• Oh, Crap!: Everyone's reaction when it appears. The Shadow itself reacts like this upon encountering Gilgamesh and is almost slain before managing to take advantage of his carelessness.
• Pre-Explosion Buildup: It's Signature Move is taking a few seconds for it to build up mana in itself which then explodes in all directions, killing anything it touches.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: It's a solid, inky black mess with red stripes.
• Run or Die: There is no fighting The Shadow. There is only escaping from it, intact or otherwise.
• Silent Antagonist: It doesn't speak. It just shows up and both confuses and terrifies everyone. The monologues it does spout are the result of it corrupting Sakura.
• Space Master: It can access Imaginary Number Space to redirect attacks like it does with Caster's fireball or store the Blackened Servants Saber Alter and Berserker when they're not needed because that's Sakura's Elemental Affinity.
• To Serve Man: It happily eats people by breaking them down into their component mana and hoovering it up. During Heaven's Feel, it ends up depopulating entire blocks of Fuyuki.
• Vader Breath: Combined with a female thirsty-sounding rasp the few times it does talk.
• You Remind Me of X: Shirou is reminded of the Great Fuyuki Fire when he sees it, particularly a large tower-like thing looming over the fire. This gives you a hint that it is actually the embryotic state of the Grail's contents, Aŋra Mainiiu/Avenger, and the tower is the fully manifested Greater Grail, corrupted by Aŋra Mainiiu.

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Aŋra Mainiiu (UTTERLY MASSIVE UNMARKED SPOILERS)

Clockwise from top left: Aŋra Mainiiu's form as All the World's Evil, Avenger's shadow form as a Servant, the Grail partially incarnated in the Unlimited Blade Works anime, the fetal Beast of Retribution in Heaven's Feel, the effect of the Grail's black mud

Aŋra Mainiiu is the Eighth Servant, belonging to the Avenger class, and a holdover from the Third Holy Grail War. It was once a man living in the 6th century Middle East, chosen to be persecuted and tortured by his people as the incarnation of "All the World's Evil". His peoples' veneration of him as such enabled his soul to become a pseudo-Heroic Spirit upon death. During the Third Holy Grail War, the Einzberns summoned him as a Servant while trying to summon the Zoroastrian God of Evil Aŋra Mainiiu, who they mistook him for. Avenger was slain due to his abysmal weakness, but when his soul was taken into the Greater Grail, it granted the wish of the people who had sacrificed the man and transformed his soul into the incarnation of All the World's Evil. Contained within and corrupting the Greater Grail, Aŋra Mainiiu waits to be reborn so that it can fulfill its own desires: the destruction of humanity.

While it appears in all three routes in the form of a corruptive black ooze, Aŋra Mainiiu's role in Fate/Stay Night is greatest in "Heaven's Feel", where it forms a Master-Servant pact with Sakura Matou, manifests through her as the Shadow, corrupts Saber and Berserker, and ultimately blackens Sakura into Dark Sakura.

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• Adaptation Dye-Job: The ooze its curse of hatred manifests as is described as being black, but Fate/Zero and the UBW anime depict it as a very dark red for the purposes of visual distinction. Even in the game, it does possess notable red highlights.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • Aŋra Mainiiu's role in the Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works] anime is expanded, with it manipulating Illya via hallucinations of her mother, and using the avatar it manifested with Shinji as a host to attack Gilgamesh.
  • In Fate/Grand Order, it's noted that Aŋra Mainiiu's All the World's Evil — the cursed mud that digests people and blackens Servants — is extremely similar to Tiamat's Sea of Life, positing a connection between Avenger's Eldritch Abomination state and the Beasts. Gilgamesh in the 2015 anime also compares Aŋra Mainiiu to them by calling it an Evil of Humanity^note "Akusei", or Evil Lifeform as well. It was eventually clarified that Aŋra Mainiiu — at least in the Heaven's Feel arc — would have been reborn as the Beast of Retribution.^note Whether this would have been the case had he incarnated through a different host, like Irisviel in Fate/Zero, Illya in the "Fate" route, or Shinji in the "Unlimited Blade Works" route, is unknown.
• Answers to the Name of God: Similarly to Assassin (a single member of a Legacy Character), Aŋra Mainiiu isn't actually the Zoroastrian God of Evil, but someone who took on its identity; in this case, a random guy who was turned into a scapegoat and declared to be Aŋra Mainiiu embodied so that people could take out their frustrations on him. Fate/Grand Order reveals that this is because the Grail can't summon deities (at least not without significant workarounds), so the grail looked for the next best thing, which turned out to be a powerless human who only qualified as a Heroic Servant due to a technicality.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Aŋra Mainiiu can be seen as embodying this. The ancient Zoroastrians wished for him to become the embodiment of All The World's Evil, and with the help of the Greater Grail that wish came true.
• The Corruption: The black sludge it produces — a lesser version of Tiamat's Sea of Life, according to Fate/Grand Order — contaminates the souls of anything it touches, giving Servants a physical body and limitless supply of mana but turning them evil, a process referred to as "blackening". It's how Saber is transformed into Saber Alter and Berserker into Dark Berserker in Heaven's Feel. Gilgamesh resists being blackened in Fate/Zero, attaining a physical body but not being driven insane due to his ego.
• The Corrupter: In the anime adaptation of Unlimited Blade Works, it appears before a young Illya in the form of Irisviel and feeds her lies and half-truths about Kiritsugu, twisting her from the sweet child seen in Fate/Zero to the bitter and vengeful girl seen in Fate/stay night. This doubles as Adaptation Expansion, since Ilya's Start of Darkness wasn't shown in the original visual novel.
• Curse: Its hatred is so powerful it manifests as a cursed black ooze that corrupts and destroys everything it comes into contact with.
• Dead Person Impersonation: In the 2013 Fate/Zero anime and the 2014 Unlimited Blade Works anime, it appears to Kiritsugu and Illyasviel as a hallucination in the form of Irisviel.
• Demonic Possession: In Heaven's Feel, it forms a Master-Servant pact with Sakura Matou and takes over her while she sleeps, manifesting as the Shadow. When she accepts her bond with it, Aŋra Mainiiu fully corrupts her into its avatar, Dark Sakura.
• Devour the Dragon: In Unlimited Blade Works, it attempts to use Gilgamesh as a host. This attempt backfires and it ends up eating him instead. It also devours him at Sakura's behest when manifested as the Shadow in "Heaven's Feel", though Gilgamesh almost manages to destroy it from the inside through his unshakeable willpower.
• Effective Knockoff: Revelations in Fate/Grand Order retrocatively imply that Aŋra Mainiiu after it was transformed into "All the World's Evils" was one of these of the true Gods of Evil in the Nasuverse, the seven Beasts. Considering that the Fuyuki Holy Grail summoned Servants using a bastardized version of the system that summoned Grand Servants, who themselves were based on the Beasts, it can be inferred that the Holy Grail took in the embodiment of the wish for a God of Evil and granted it using the knowledge it was based on as well as the protocols it was programmed with to transform Avenger into an inferior derivative. Of course, being a weaker copy of incredibly powerful world destroyers means Aŋra Mainiiu is still a dangerous threat in its own right. The Q&A with Nasu in the third Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel blu-ray confirms that if Aŋra Mainiiu had united with Dark Sakura and been allowed to fully manifest during Heaven's Feel he would have become a Beast representing the Evil of Retribution. Whether this would have applied had it been reborn through Irisviel or Illya, or applies to his other partial manifestations — like in the Unlimited Blade Works route using Shinji as a host — is unclear. It was stated in a 2017 interview for the last one discussing how Production Foreshadowing in Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works] for this very concept was Gilgamesh trying to incarnate an Evil of Humanity, so in-universe, he seemed to be under the impression it could work.
• Eldritch Abomination: While it Was Once a Man, once Avenger was slain the Fuyuki Grail attempted to grant the ancient Zoroastrians' wishes that Aŋra Mainiiu become the incarnation of "All the World's Evil". The result of this "black miracle" was the weakest Servant in the Third Grail War taking over the Greater Grail and corrupting it to be reborn as a Beast-class entity representing the Evil of Retribution and desiring nothing less than to destroy humanity; with the black ooze it emits in this state either corrupts or destroys everything it comes into contact with. In the 2014 Unlimited Blade Works anime it uses Shinji as a host to manifest a massive humanoid torso with two glowing red slit-shaped openings, one in its chest and one in its head; and in the Heaven's Feel route it partially manifests as the Shadow using Sakura as a host, and when it is almost completely reborn it takes the form of a massive multi-eyed creature with gangly arms. The Counter Force considered Aŋra Mainiiu a great enough threat that it would have taken direct action had Avenger successfully been incarnated. According to Nasu in the Heaven's Feel III spring song interview, Aŋra Mainiiu incarnating as the Beast of Retribution through Dark Sakura would have drowned half the world in its black mud before the Grand Servants showed up to stop it.
• Eldritch Transformation: As exposited in Fate/hollow ataxia and interviews with Nasu, "Aŋra Mainiiu" was once a mortal human scapegoated and ritualistically sacrificed by the ancient Zoroastrians as the incarnation of All the World's Evil. This belief led to him being recorded as a "Hero" of sorts, and he was summoned as an Avenger-class pseudo-Servant by the Einzberns — who were hoping to cheat the system by summoning the Zoroastian God of Evil — and was almost immediately killed due to being pathetically weak and not even having a Noble Phantasm. Due to Aŋra Mainiiu's unusual nature, the Greater Grail recognized him as a human and attempted to grant the wish of the ancient Zoroastrians who'd sacrificed him — for Aŋra Mainiiu to become the incarnation of All the World's Evil. This corrupted the Grail System into a womb for Aŋra Mainiiu to be reborn as a Beast-class entity embodying the Evil of Retribution, though the closest it came to this was in the Heaven's Feel route with Sakura Matou as its host, Shinji Matou only producing an imperfect manifestation in the Unlimited Blade Works route.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": "Aŋra Mainiiu" isn't its real name; its original name was completely erased from the annals of history, and the man himself has forgotten it after getting punched one too many times in the face by his fellow villagers. Most simply refer to it as the Greater Grail.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: Its most iconic manifestation is as an organic black tower with jagged prongs at the top and a black hole floating overhead, vomiting out its black ooze.
• Fighting a Shadow: Despite partially manifesting in all three routes, Aŋra Mainiiu remains inside the Greater Grail until Fate/hollow ataraxia, where it is expelled and reverted back to being Avenger.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: In the distant past, it had no supernatural powers at all. The reason being that it was an ordinary man chosen to be a scapegoat for every evil in the world and brutally tortured for the rest of his natural life until hedied of old age. Naturally, the process drove him insane with hatred and enabled him to be summoned in the Third Grail War as Avenger. However, he wasn't a true Heroic Spirit and had no Noble Phantasm, meaning he was immediately and easily slain. It wasn't until his soul was taken into the Greater Grail that his people's wish for him to become the embodiment of All the World's Evil was granted and he was transfigured into an Eldritch Abomination.
• God of Evil: Supposedly. Turns out he's not actually a Divine Spirit but some random schmuck who had the dubious honor of being branded Aŋra Mainiiu, and eventually came to be the incarnation of the wish for a god to embody all the world's evils, but it wasn't until Avenger was placed in the wish granting Holy Grail that he could live up to his name.
• Greater-Scope Villain: This thing's the evil that corrupts the Holy Grail, and is responsible for antiheroes and villains being summonable as Heroic Spirits.
• Hate Plague: It enflames the negative emotions of those who are connected to it or inundates them with its own hatred, corrupting them.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: While the Greater Grail itself technically had no will of its own, Aŋra Mainiiu took over and corrupted it.
• Incendiary Exponent: Its black ichor can set things on fire. It's what caused the Fuyuki Fire, granting Kirei's vengeful dying wish.
• Jerkass Genie: One of the biggest spoilers is that Aŋra Mainiiu has taken over the Greater Grail. While the Grail system is still capable of granting the wishes of whoever touches it, it only does so in a way that ensures mass destruction and death.
• Joke Character: Aŋra Mainiiu was slain rather quickly in the Third Holy Grail War due to how weak he was — not even possessing a Noble Phantasm until his revival in Fate/hollow ataraxia. This is reflected in Fate/Grand Order, which has him have some of the lowest stats in the game (originally, it was going to be that the entire Avenger class was incredibly weak; however, it was instead decided to make them a Glass Cannon class and just have Aŋra Mainiiu be incredibly weak instead).
• Kill All Humans: It's third behind Primate Murder and Type-Mercury/ORT, whichever celestial body the Type is actually from,^note The databook makes the lore ambiguous and Fate/Grand Order further muddies it. in the "Entity best suited for wiping out humanity" contest, as they can kill humans at much faster rates. Furthermore, any wish it grants is twisted to result in death and destruction.
• Made of Evil: It is literally the incarnation of All the World's Evil, the embodiment of several billion peoples' worth of curses and hatred.
• Mind Rape: Those who are blackened by its ooze are overwhelmed and corrupted by its raw hatred and turned evil.
• Muck Monster: Its primary manifestation is as a cursed black sludge variously called "All the World's Evils" or ""All The Evils of The World", which corrupts or destroys whatever it touches.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: The black/red/purple sludge it produces, "All the World's Evils," is the liquidized form of its hate, 6 billion curses that targets all people in the world. The sludge itself is retroactively revealed to be a knockoff of the primordial goddess Tiamat's Sea of Life, which has the same appearance and properties but on even higher scale.
• Outside-Context Problem: Only three of the characters — namely Kirei, Gilgamesh, and Zouken — know of its existence at first, and summoning it is the driving force behind their actions. It doesn't become directly involved in the Fifth Grail War itself until the end of all three routes. On the larger scheme of things, the whole mess started because when Aŋra Mainiiu was drawn into the Greater Grail after his defeat in the Third Holy Grail War. As he was so weak, the system didn't recognize him as a Servant, who are supposed to be broken down for the Grail's mana. Instead, it thought it was a human, and thus, the winner of the Holy Grail War. The corruption of the Grail started when it attempted to grant the wish that was the origin of Aŋra Mainiiu — namely, the wish to have a singular entity be responsible for All The World's Evils.
• The Power of Hate: This thing thrives off of it, and when you've been tortured for a lifetime over superstitious cruelty, you won't be a happy camper either.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Its cursed ooze is described as black, but in the Fate/Zero and Unlimited Blade Works anime is colored as being black with pulsing patches of red, or just as dark red.
• Red Baron: It is referred to as Aŋra Mainiiu, Angra Mainyu, All the World's Evil, or All the Evils of the World. Its manifestation in Heaven's Feel is called the Shadow. Those who don't know what it truly is refer to it as the object which it has taken over and corrupted, the Greater Grail.
• The Scapegoat: This is how he became known as Aŋra Mainiiu. The village he grew up in was a very superstitious bunch and wanted someone they could blame for evil, as well as inflict some payback on.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Its essence is sealed away, and it seeks to be reborn to destroy humanity. Said can is the Greater Grail, which it has corrupted and taken over. The true purpose of the Grail Wars has been hijacked by it from opening a gate to the Root to providing enough energy for it to reincarnate.
• Self-Disposing Villain: After the manifestation it created using Shinji Matou as a host is destroyed by Saber, Avenger tries to steal a wounded Gilgamesh's body to manifest in the real world during the finale of Unlimited Blade Works. In vain, Gilgamesh tries to remind Avenger that he can't use another Servant as a host, but he's too desperate to listen and winds up consuming Gilgamesh instead, with the portal to the Grail closing.
• Spell My Name With An S: While most fan- and official English translations prior to 2018 render his name with the modern spelling "Angra Mainyu", the English translation of Fate/Grand Order officially romanizes his name "Aŋra Mainiiu", which more accurately represents the original Avestan spelling.
• Super-Empowering: Servants that come into contact with its black ooze are blackened, granting them physical bodies, mostly-augmented abilities, and limitless mana as long as they remain connected to the sludge, but turning them evil.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: Before becoming what it is now, it was human who was designated as the embodiment of evil by his people and was subsequently subjected to hideous torture. After he died, he decided that he might as well become what he was perceived to be, and thus Aŋra Mainiiu was born.
• Tragic Villain: All it was before being corrupted into an Eldritch Abomination was a man who had the rather unfortunate fate of being scapegoated as the source of all things evil in the world, and as a result lived a life of torture and misery. No wonder it acts the way it does.
• Villain Override:
  • When Illya's heart is stabbed into Shinji Matou's body in the "Unlimited Blade Works" route, Aŋra Mainiiu claims him as its host and tries to use him as a means be reborn. Shinji proves unsuitable for the task, resulting in a bloated mass of flesh uncapable of doing much beyond vomiting black ichor everywhere. After Shinji is removed from its manifestation, Aŋra Mainiiu attempts to nab Gilgamesh to replace him and then reshapes its avatar into a towering humanoid torso before being vaporized by Saber.
  • It tries to pull this on Gilgamesh in the climax of "Unlimited Blade Works", attempting to use him as a host when the manifestation it created using Shinji is destroyed by Saber. Unfortunately for Aŋra Mainiiu, it can't use a fellow Servant as a host and it ends up consuming Gilgamesh instead before the portal to the interior of the Greater Grail closes.
  • It pulls this on Dark Sakura in the climax of Heaven's Feel. Once Dark Sakura realizes the error of her ways and turns against it, Aŋra Mainiiu exploits their connection to use her powers as it wants against her will, turning her into a glorified magic wand. Shirou stops it by using Rule Breaker to sever their connection and free Sakura.
• Walking Spoiler: Due to its nature as the entire saga's Greater-Scope Villain and Outside-Context Problem.
• Was Once a Man: One of the most shocking revelations about it is that it used to be human. Specifically, it used to be a literally nameless man living in the 5th Century who was scapegoated as the incarnation of all the evils in the world and tortured until he went insane with hatred. After he died he became an evil Heroic Spirit and was summoned as Avenger during the Third Holy Grail War, but upon his defeat his soul took over the Greater Grail and was transfigured into the embodiment of All the World's Evil.

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