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* FanNickname: The Saber Squad, for Shirou's servant pack.
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* FanNickname: The Saber Squad, for Shirou's servant pack.
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* WhatCouldHaveBeen: Before it was declared a DeadFic, [[WordOfGod CrossyCross]] decided to post his author notes on Spacebattles forums. '''''Open at your own peril!!!'''''
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* WhatCouldHaveBeen: Before it was declared a DeadFic, DeadFic 4 months later, [[WordOfGod CrossyCross]] decided to post his author notes on Spacebattles forums.forums on April 2016. '''''Open at your own peril!!!'''''
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EIther way, it's a painful reminder for everyone that not even the powerhouse team is invincible, especially if they rush into things.
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Vasavi Shakti, used as a melee weapon as it turns out, disagrees. ANd without being thrown, the weapon does not break and can be reused.
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Vasavi Shakti, used as a melee weapon as it turns out, disagrees. ANd And without being thrown, the weapon does not break and can be reused.
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Aabidah goes off on her own and...probably does evil things to evil people in the MIddle East. We'll leave it at that. ISIS likely gets neutered.
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Aabidah goes off on her own and...probably does evil things to evil people in the MIddle Middle East. We'll leave it at that. ISIS likely gets neutered.
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* WhatCouldHaveBeen: Before it was declared a DeadFic, [[WordOfGod CrossyCross]] decided to post his author notes on Spacebattles forums. ''''Open at your own peril!!!'''''
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* WhatCouldHaveBeen: Before it was declared a DeadFic, [[WordOfGod CrossyCross]] decided to post his author notes on Spacebattles forums. ''''Open '''''Open at your own peril!!!'''''
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WhatCouldHaveBeen: Before it was declared a DeadFic, [[WordOfGod CrossyCross]] decided to post his author notes on Spacebattles forums. ''''Open at your own peril!!!'''''
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WhatCouldHaveBeen: Before it was declared a DeadFic, [[WordOfGod CrossyCross]] decided to post his author notes on Spacebattles forums. ''''Open at your own peril!!!'''''
[[folder: '''SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE STORY''']]
Okay, first off, Lionstone is not a fool. Powerful as Napoleon is, Jackie isn't quite so. And he needs allies if his suspicions are true.
Through a series of events I honestly don't remember anymore, he makes a team with Medea. No, he doesn't know who Medea is. Yes, he makes plans to bail out the moment he figures out who she is because hahaha-no, he knows quite well what she likely thinks of the master with an Assassin specced to murder her.
Also, he blows up Shirou's house.
With a lot of explosives, he blows up Shirou's house. Shirou is unharmed, but Taiga kinda dies, and Napoleon starts firing on the remains while riding one of Lionstone's animated lions. While the Lion is fleeing, his artillery remains floating at his side at the same speed, firing all the while as the servants of Shirou's alliance chase after Napoleon straight into Ryuudou temple, where the rest of his alliance team is waiting.
Shirou's team kinda gets wrecked due to surprise attacks and whole buncha traps and only survives because Simo Hayha deployed his Reality Marble and confused everyone but his allies as they limped away. Even so, some carry some serious wounds that will make them notably weaker. I was initially planning on getting Nero or Lily captured, but then I decided that that's when they have to deploy their best, Lily's Avalon and Nero's Reality Marble, just to survive.
EIther way, it's a painful reminder for everyone that not even the powerhouse team is invincible, especially if they rush into things.
In any case, Napoleon dies first.
Emboldened by Gilgamesh's words and his recent victory, he takes to the field with a mix of arrogance and competence. That is, he initiates a seriously heavy battle in one of the parks and starts taking on multiple servants, keeping them away with his artillery and readying an opportune moment for the rest of his allies to strike. Jackie is personally waiting for a female so she can gut someone and make a kill.
There are things to be written and included to show it's a daring, risky, but agreeable gambit. Risky, but massive payoffs.
In any case, Simo shoots him through the throat.
Then Karna steps in and shoots him with his bow's special ability and fires a laser through his skull. You know, because reasons.
Then Achilles steps in beside Karna and makes a grand, arrogant claim, then confuses everyone with the designations their masters tells them to use. I forgot the specific words, but they don't use the proper servant classifications and instead use made-up ones, then keep mentioning different classes they might be. Misdirection, constantly.
Gilgamesh, who had been watching from afar gets rather pissed at having one of the few people he's decided are worthy, get killed by assassination, and takes to the field.
Achilles and Karna makes a show of dismissing him and Achilles waving off Karna to take on the gold-armored due because "eh, he's probably not worth my time. And hey, your armors match!"
Gilgamesh gets rather pissed, but his arrogance makes him decide to murder what feels to him like a rather weak servant.
A bit later, he's getting rammed by Karna's vimana and getting an arm and a leg chopped off by Parashu and he has no idea how all that happened.
Meanwhile, Achilles wrecks face because he's invulnerable and one of the most utterly broken melee servants around and generally has a fun time punching in teeth.
Gilgamesh, incapable of fleeing in front of so many other servants because of his pride, unleashes his own vimana and starts a dogfight with Karna as he starts chugging healing potions.
Worryingly, he discovers that despite his greater number of phantasms, Karna is far far better at using a Vimana than him, and has terrifying skill at dogfighting. And despite being a rider, while he can no longer fire ten thousand arrows in one sitting, a few hundred is still worrying when each arrow is basically a laser.
This is when everyone who can fly joins in and starts an aerial dogfight involving flying chariots, flying horses, flying people, and ancient indian spaceships.
People from far away thinks that it's the raddest fireworks display they've ever seen in living memory.
Ground-bound servants become supremely jelly.
Sasaki dies here, an unfortunate casualty of Achilles. One thing to survive a berserk Heracles, as he's faster and facing an unskilled brute. Another to fight an enemy just as fast, but with skill retained to boot, and weaponry that slows him down. He's a hair too slow and gets torn apart.
The battle goes crazily intense, but gets truly horrific when the Sabers, eager to fight, decide they want to join in. Alter is the one that pushes them over the edge and convinces/forces Shirou to let them join.
EVERYONE is watching the battle by now. Major as it is, they can't not notice it. When the four sabers join in, Ilya goes ballistic and wants them gone, and her servants go in.
Luvia's servants were there before the Sabers got in, and there is a mix of hilarity and feels when the sabers meet Lancelot and Merlin. Normal Saber almost gets PTSD at seeing Lancelot again.
In any case, this is a major, major battle. Servants die a lot here. Cu Chulainn fights with Alter and gets vaporized by Excalibur Sanguine for his trouble after he obliterates half her body throughout the course of their battle.
There would have been a cliffhanger where she cackles about winning as she bleeds out, Lily disengages from Achilles to help her with Avalon, and you suddenly get Jackie's POV as she prepares to strike down the vulnerable servant with her anti-woman NP.
Lionstone however calls her down in the next chapter and they spend the rest of the fic taking a plane and getting the hell out of dodge because fuck no will Lionstone stick around with just an Assassin in this clusterfuck.
Siegfried gets shot down from the skies by Simo, but survives, only to get sucked in Simo's reality marble when he closes in on the 'fleeing' assassin that dared shoot him in the back.
He doesn't survive that, though it takes a lot of killing to end him.
Four servants down in one battle. Yeah, it's as brutal as you think. This is when the fic takes a nosedive into the meat of the fic, which involves the dying.
In any case, Lancelot has a shouting match with Arturia, then Lily and Alter confuses things because of how they did it in their worlds. Lily made Lancelot ashamed because apparently all he needed to do was tell Arturia about it, for one.
There's a lot of tension there that's cut off when Gilgamesh pulls out Ea as he crashes down, beaten in the aerial dogfight by Karna and utterly hateful of everything now.
Shit gets fucking real when Samson and Moses joins in just to aim for Gilgamesh.
This is the part where you see Samson shatter noble phantasms by punching them because he's at his most powerful, facing a heavily divine enemy with the greatest threat meter and horrible sin level.
Ea at full force gets unleashed and Moses recreates Part the Sea on it by breaking his staff, though it leaves him weak. Still it's NOT enough for Samson to get in close to Gilgamesh.
Aabidah appearing behind him and using one of her Zabaniyas to distract him, however, does. Yes, she met Moses.
And THEN Samsons gets close and tears off another limb from Gilgamesh. He gets chained by Enkidu, but it doesn't work because he has no divinity and he proceeds to rip off Gilgamesh's head. Thus ends the King of Heroes.
Luvia thinks smart and immediately uses up a command seal to make Lancelot pick up Ea in time.
Everyone proceeds to shit themselves.
And it's still not done. Only when Scathach decides to her earlier fight with Moses and annihilates him with Gae Bolg's spear-throw while he's gaping at Lancelot holding Ea. Then she retreats from the battle.
That's the cue all others take to get out of dodge, and one of the fiercest battles in Nerve Damage ends.
Five servants down, six if you count Gilgamesh, seven if you count Jackie getting put on a bus. Almost a fourth of all competitors, gone. Shit has gone real at this point. A lot of have taken casualties, but not Shirou and Rin. Technically, not Sakura either, but Aabidah is still sorta-estranged from her (Moses was teaching her of forgiveness, but died before all the lessons could truly stick).
And it's now known that the team with FOUR fucking Sabers is allied with Julius fucking Caesar, and what is most likely to be at least two other servants. Definitely, the chick with the blindfold on a pegasus was seen working with him. Worst case scenario, there are THREE masters in one alliance.
As you can imagine, plans are made to take them out.
But not before Scathach ends up getting assaulted in her fortress. Henry thinks that with only one servant inside, having double the number of servants to assault it should be an easy win.
Thing is, the fortress is complete, and there is no way in hell that anyone can beat Scathach. Bazzett's plan was to wait out the war and let the others come to her, as she only has one servant, but what a servant. Scathach is technically unbeatable in her domain. Fucking immortal, man!
Vasavi Shakti, used as a melee weapon as it turns out, disagrees. ANd without being thrown, the weapon does not break and can be reused.
As she dies, impaled upon his spear, Scathach's only request for Karna is that if he lives after this, can he find the real her, and end her life? Karna, ever the saint, promises to do so.
Bazzett is out of the game now.
This time, the Sabers take the initiative as Caesar points out the obvious prediction that alliance will be made against them.
They have two known enemy master locations: Ryuudou Temple, and Ilya's mansion. They take the temple.
Medea, not prepared for an assault of five fucking servants, gets utterly wrecked. the teacher, despite being offered peace, decides to die by her side.
Alter has one final duel with Lu Bu as everyone watches, but in the end he dies, weakened by the loss of an anchor and injuries from other Sabers. He dies nobly all the same, with a laugh and a smile. "Good fight," he says. "Good war. Do try to win, eh? So I can say I was beaten by the best."
Alter points out that she has two kills over Blue Saber now. There is much salt and puffing.
Luvia goes with Waver, as he has a sterling reputation. Samson, knowing he cannot win alone, allies with Ilya. Aabidah shadows him. Henry keeps to himself, though he makes a visit to Shirou under truce and catches up on his student.
And now, there are but four factions in this holy grail war.
The climax is at hand.
Henry is assaulted by Luvia's group when he refuses to join forces with her, and Achilles dies fighting them, with no casualties on the other side. There were simply too many, though he makes a good showing of himself and Henry activates his ultimate rage to horribly weaken and injure nonetheless.
Then Shirou and Luvia clash, and blood is shed. Lancelot kills Simo in revenge for Siegfried, while in the reality marble of the Great Khan, Saber Alter unleashes the Devouring Ooze of Excalibur Sanguine. Shocked, stunned, but resolute, the Great Khan dies fighting among his family. Medusa fights Lancelot, and is almost immediately destroyed by Ea. Her pegasus dies, and her body is wrecked.
As expected, this is when Ilya, filled with horrific emotion and servant spirits, kinda explodes into the corrupted Grail. Everyone in the epicenter is corrupted. Herakles, Hector, Odysseus, they become Dark Servants. Samson, only partly-tainted, fights against them and finds them horrifically powerful, if mad.
He tries to get to the grail and destroy it and actually makes headway due to his empowerments against such threats, but then other Dark Servants rise, monstrous forms of the dead walk out from the corrupted grail.
Oh fuck.
He decides instead to buy time for Aabidah to flee and tell the others what has happened. Tell them the Grail is False, that it must be destroyed. She flees and obeys.
Aabidah gets there in time before there are any other casualties (she interrupts Lancelot's killing blow on Medusa), and convinces everyone with the help of level heads and actual common sense, but nonetheless the situation is grim. Most everyone is tired and injured, and while the number of servants are equal yet other monsters are being spawned.
This not being a Bad End fic, they win nonetheless. Excalibur(s), Aetus Domus Area, and Ea destroy Angra Mainyu, the reality marble gathering every important bit of him in one place to be destroyed completely.
Julius Caesar holds the line against the monsters before getting gutted by a Dark Achilles who is purged by Karna.
Karna is the powerhouse in play against enemy servants. Where he walks, victory follows. None can stand against Vasavi Shakti, and this is where the most powerful, non-Gilgamesh servant shows off why he's so OP.
Nonetheless, there are casualties. With Vasavi Shakti, he loses his armor and his allied Servant have to work to defend him. Specific deaths were never personally determined, but some Saber/s were in the mix. Lancelot survives though, as does Merlin. Those are the important factors.
EMIYA works with Iskander and arms the army with legendary weapons to stand against the corrupted Great Khan. It's not the best of circumstances to fight a former ally for Iskander, but still, it works and they win.
EMIYA likely dies at some point, I think shot at by Simo then having Hector teleport behind him (they're within his boundary field NP, which lets him teleport anywhere inside) and gut him.
In any case, the cast is cut down heavily, but the war is won and everything is...more or less done. No, Ilya is not saved. Deal with it.
Merlin being around is the important factor, as the most famous wizard of them all finds it trivially easy to make homunculus bodies of sufficient power to satisfy servants.
The epilogue is the more difficult things for me, as it varies between some very cracked separation, or harems.
Lancelot is kinda miffed at not actually getting a wish and fixing everything. Eventually, he shrugs and becomes a permanent hire for the Edelfelts and also becomes a pilot. Lily/Alter helps in him getting over things. Lily because she's just that wonderful, and Alter because she's gruff but sensible.
Karna goes off into the world a new man. He kills the real Scathach, then has a good life, enjoying it to its fullest. He doesn't specifically look for evil, but if he finds them...well, generally they get wrecked.
Aabidah goes off on her own and...probably does evil things to evil people in the MIddle East. We'll leave it at that. ISIS likely gets neutered.
Sakura is very much encouraged by Nero (if she lives) to pursue Shirou. Rin may or may not join, having actually considered his offer to teach their children how to make nerve circuits.
The Sabers...eh. Alter may have become super tsundere for Shirou along the course of it, may not and do her own thing. Lily, amazingly enough, is an independent woman and goes off on her own thing without question. Arturia likely follows her.
Nero may join in, may not and instead be with Shirou. It varies.
Medusa is pretty much tied to Sakura the same way Sakura's tied to Shirou.
Jordan either encounters Merlin, the "Doll" woman who makes homunculus, or just plain supports her on his own reserves. She's an assassin. Cheap as hell and he constantly hunts bad people she can drain, usually with a lot of prana to nab. They get married later on. Whether or not they can make children is up in the air, but it's not as if he's the heir of the family or anything.
[[/folder]]
[[folder: '''SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE STORY''']]
Okay, first off, Lionstone is not a fool. Powerful as Napoleon is, Jackie isn't quite so. And he needs allies if his suspicions are true.
Through a series of events I honestly don't remember anymore, he makes a team with Medea. No, he doesn't know who Medea is. Yes, he makes plans to bail out the moment he figures out who she is because hahaha-no, he knows quite well what she likely thinks of the master with an Assassin specced to murder her.
Also, he blows up Shirou's house.
With a lot of explosives, he blows up Shirou's house. Shirou is unharmed, but Taiga kinda dies, and Napoleon starts firing on the remains while riding one of Lionstone's animated lions. While the Lion is fleeing, his artillery remains floating at his side at the same speed, firing all the while as the servants of Shirou's alliance chase after Napoleon straight into Ryuudou temple, where the rest of his alliance team is waiting.
Shirou's team kinda gets wrecked due to surprise attacks and whole buncha traps and only survives because Simo Hayha deployed his Reality Marble and confused everyone but his allies as they limped away. Even so, some carry some serious wounds that will make them notably weaker. I was initially planning on getting Nero or Lily captured, but then I decided that that's when they have to deploy their best, Lily's Avalon and Nero's Reality Marble, just to survive.
EIther way, it's a painful reminder for everyone that not even the powerhouse team is invincible, especially if they rush into things.
In any case, Napoleon dies first.
Emboldened by Gilgamesh's words and his recent victory, he takes to the field with a mix of arrogance and competence. That is, he initiates a seriously heavy battle in one of the parks and starts taking on multiple servants, keeping them away with his artillery and readying an opportune moment for the rest of his allies to strike. Jackie is personally waiting for a female so she can gut someone and make a kill.
There are things to be written and included to show it's a daring, risky, but agreeable gambit. Risky, but massive payoffs.
In any case, Simo shoots him through the throat.
Then Karna steps in and shoots him with his bow's special ability and fires a laser through his skull. You know, because reasons.
Then Achilles steps in beside Karna and makes a grand, arrogant claim, then confuses everyone with the designations their masters tells them to use. I forgot the specific words, but they don't use the proper servant classifications and instead use made-up ones, then keep mentioning different classes they might be. Misdirection, constantly.
Gilgamesh, who had been watching from afar gets rather pissed at having one of the few people he's decided are worthy, get killed by assassination, and takes to the field.
Achilles and Karna makes a show of dismissing him and Achilles waving off Karna to take on the gold-armored due because "eh, he's probably not worth my time. And hey, your armors match!"
Gilgamesh gets rather pissed, but his arrogance makes him decide to murder what feels to him like a rather weak servant.
A bit later, he's getting rammed by Karna's vimana and getting an arm and a leg chopped off by Parashu and he has no idea how all that happened.
Meanwhile, Achilles wrecks face because he's invulnerable and one of the most utterly broken melee servants around and generally has a fun time punching in teeth.
Gilgamesh, incapable of fleeing in front of so many other servants because of his pride, unleashes his own vimana and starts a dogfight with Karna as he starts chugging healing potions.
Worryingly, he discovers that despite his greater number of phantasms, Karna is far far better at using a Vimana than him, and has terrifying skill at dogfighting. And despite being a rider, while he can no longer fire ten thousand arrows in one sitting, a few hundred is still worrying when each arrow is basically a laser.
This is when everyone who can fly joins in and starts an aerial dogfight involving flying chariots, flying horses, flying people, and ancient indian spaceships.
People from far away thinks that it's the raddest fireworks display they've ever seen in living memory.
Ground-bound servants become supremely jelly.
Sasaki dies here, an unfortunate casualty of Achilles. One thing to survive a berserk Heracles, as he's faster and facing an unskilled brute. Another to fight an enemy just as fast, but with skill retained to boot, and weaponry that slows him down. He's a hair too slow and gets torn apart.
The battle goes crazily intense, but gets truly horrific when the Sabers, eager to fight, decide they want to join in. Alter is the one that pushes them over the edge and convinces/forces Shirou to let them join.
EVERYONE is watching the battle by now. Major as it is, they can't not notice it. When the four sabers join in, Ilya goes ballistic and wants them gone, and her servants go in.
Luvia's servants were there before the Sabers got in, and there is a mix of hilarity and feels when the sabers meet Lancelot and Merlin. Normal Saber almost gets PTSD at seeing Lancelot again.
In any case, this is a major, major battle. Servants die a lot here. Cu Chulainn fights with Alter and gets vaporized by Excalibur Sanguine for his trouble after he obliterates half her body throughout the course of their battle.
There would have been a cliffhanger where she cackles about winning as she bleeds out, Lily disengages from Achilles to help her with Avalon, and you suddenly get Jackie's POV as she prepares to strike down the vulnerable servant with her anti-woman NP.
Lionstone however calls her down in the next chapter and they spend the rest of the fic taking a plane and getting the hell out of dodge because fuck no will Lionstone stick around with just an Assassin in this clusterfuck.
Siegfried gets shot down from the skies by Simo, but survives, only to get sucked in Simo's reality marble when he closes in on the 'fleeing' assassin that dared shoot him in the back.
He doesn't survive that, though it takes a lot of killing to end him.
Four servants down in one battle. Yeah, it's as brutal as you think. This is when the fic takes a nosedive into the meat of the fic, which involves the dying.
In any case, Lancelot has a shouting match with Arturia, then Lily and Alter confuses things because of how they did it in their worlds. Lily made Lancelot ashamed because apparently all he needed to do was tell Arturia about it, for one.
There's a lot of tension there that's cut off when Gilgamesh pulls out Ea as he crashes down, beaten in the aerial dogfight by Karna and utterly hateful of everything now.
Shit gets fucking real when Samson and Moses joins in just to aim for Gilgamesh.
This is the part where you see Samson shatter noble phantasms by punching them because he's at his most powerful, facing a heavily divine enemy with the greatest threat meter and horrible sin level.
Ea at full force gets unleashed and Moses recreates Part the Sea on it by breaking his staff, though it leaves him weak. Still it's NOT enough for Samson to get in close to Gilgamesh.
Aabidah appearing behind him and using one of her Zabaniyas to distract him, however, does. Yes, she met Moses.
And THEN Samsons gets close and tears off another limb from Gilgamesh. He gets chained by Enkidu, but it doesn't work because he has no divinity and he proceeds to rip off Gilgamesh's head. Thus ends the King of Heroes.
Luvia thinks smart and immediately uses up a command seal to make Lancelot pick up Ea in time.
Everyone proceeds to shit themselves.
And it's still not done. Only when Scathach decides to her earlier fight with Moses and annihilates him with Gae Bolg's spear-throw while he's gaping at Lancelot holding Ea. Then she retreats from the battle.
That's the cue all others take to get out of dodge, and one of the fiercest battles in Nerve Damage ends.
Five servants down, six if you count Gilgamesh, seven if you count Jackie getting put on a bus. Almost a fourth of all competitors, gone. Shit has gone real at this point. A lot of have taken casualties, but not Shirou and Rin. Technically, not Sakura either, but Aabidah is still sorta-estranged from her (Moses was teaching her of forgiveness, but died before all the lessons could truly stick).
And it's now known that the team with FOUR fucking Sabers is allied with Julius fucking Caesar, and what is most likely to be at least two other servants. Definitely, the chick with the blindfold on a pegasus was seen working with him. Worst case scenario, there are THREE masters in one alliance.
As you can imagine, plans are made to take them out.
But not before Scathach ends up getting assaulted in her fortress. Henry thinks that with only one servant inside, having double the number of servants to assault it should be an easy win.
Thing is, the fortress is complete, and there is no way in hell that anyone can beat Scathach. Bazzett's plan was to wait out the war and let the others come to her, as she only has one servant, but what a servant. Scathach is technically unbeatable in her domain. Fucking immortal, man!
Vasavi Shakti, used as a melee weapon as it turns out, disagrees. ANd without being thrown, the weapon does not break and can be reused.
As she dies, impaled upon his spear, Scathach's only request for Karna is that if he lives after this, can he find the real her, and end her life? Karna, ever the saint, promises to do so.
Bazzett is out of the game now.
This time, the Sabers take the initiative as Caesar points out the obvious prediction that alliance will be made against them.
They have two known enemy master locations: Ryuudou Temple, and Ilya's mansion. They take the temple.
Medea, not prepared for an assault of five fucking servants, gets utterly wrecked. the teacher, despite being offered peace, decides to die by her side.
Alter has one final duel with Lu Bu as everyone watches, but in the end he dies, weakened by the loss of an anchor and injuries from other Sabers. He dies nobly all the same, with a laugh and a smile. "Good fight," he says. "Good war. Do try to win, eh? So I can say I was beaten by the best."
Alter points out that she has two kills over Blue Saber now. There is much salt and puffing.
Luvia goes with Waver, as he has a sterling reputation. Samson, knowing he cannot win alone, allies with Ilya. Aabidah shadows him. Henry keeps to himself, though he makes a visit to Shirou under truce and catches up on his student.
And now, there are but four factions in this holy grail war.
The climax is at hand.
Henry is assaulted by Luvia's group when he refuses to join forces with her, and Achilles dies fighting them, with no casualties on the other side. There were simply too many, though he makes a good showing of himself and Henry activates his ultimate rage to horribly weaken and injure nonetheless.
Then Shirou and Luvia clash, and blood is shed. Lancelot kills Simo in revenge for Siegfried, while in the reality marble of the Great Khan, Saber Alter unleashes the Devouring Ooze of Excalibur Sanguine. Shocked, stunned, but resolute, the Great Khan dies fighting among his family. Medusa fights Lancelot, and is almost immediately destroyed by Ea. Her pegasus dies, and her body is wrecked.
As expected, this is when Ilya, filled with horrific emotion and servant spirits, kinda explodes into the corrupted Grail. Everyone in the epicenter is corrupted. Herakles, Hector, Odysseus, they become Dark Servants. Samson, only partly-tainted, fights against them and finds them horrifically powerful, if mad.
He tries to get to the grail and destroy it and actually makes headway due to his empowerments against such threats, but then other Dark Servants rise, monstrous forms of the dead walk out from the corrupted grail.
Oh fuck.
He decides instead to buy time for Aabidah to flee and tell the others what has happened. Tell them the Grail is False, that it must be destroyed. She flees and obeys.
Aabidah gets there in time before there are any other casualties (she interrupts Lancelot's killing blow on Medusa), and convinces everyone with the help of level heads and actual common sense, but nonetheless the situation is grim. Most everyone is tired and injured, and while the number of servants are equal yet other monsters are being spawned.
This not being a Bad End fic, they win nonetheless. Excalibur(s), Aetus Domus Area, and Ea destroy Angra Mainyu, the reality marble gathering every important bit of him in one place to be destroyed completely.
Julius Caesar holds the line against the monsters before getting gutted by a Dark Achilles who is purged by Karna.
Karna is the powerhouse in play against enemy servants. Where he walks, victory follows. None can stand against Vasavi Shakti, and this is where the most powerful, non-Gilgamesh servant shows off why he's so OP.
Nonetheless, there are casualties. With Vasavi Shakti, he loses his armor and his allied Servant have to work to defend him. Specific deaths were never personally determined, but some Saber/s were in the mix. Lancelot survives though, as does Merlin. Those are the important factors.
EMIYA works with Iskander and arms the army with legendary weapons to stand against the corrupted Great Khan. It's not the best of circumstances to fight a former ally for Iskander, but still, it works and they win.
EMIYA likely dies at some point, I think shot at by Simo then having Hector teleport behind him (they're within his boundary field NP, which lets him teleport anywhere inside) and gut him.
In any case, the cast is cut down heavily, but the war is won and everything is...more or less done. No, Ilya is not saved. Deal with it.
Merlin being around is the important factor, as the most famous wizard of them all finds it trivially easy to make homunculus bodies of sufficient power to satisfy servants.
The epilogue is the more difficult things for me, as it varies between some very cracked separation, or harems.
Lancelot is kinda miffed at not actually getting a wish and fixing everything. Eventually, he shrugs and becomes a permanent hire for the Edelfelts and also becomes a pilot. Lily/Alter helps in him getting over things. Lily because she's just that wonderful, and Alter because she's gruff but sensible.
Karna goes off into the world a new man. He kills the real Scathach, then has a good life, enjoying it to its fullest. He doesn't specifically look for evil, but if he finds them...well, generally they get wrecked.
Aabidah goes off on her own and...probably does evil things to evil people in the MIddle East. We'll leave it at that. ISIS likely gets neutered.
Sakura is very much encouraged by Nero (if she lives) to pursue Shirou. Rin may or may not join, having actually considered his offer to teach their children how to make nerve circuits.
The Sabers...eh. Alter may have become super tsundere for Shirou along the course of it, may not and do her own thing. Lily, amazingly enough, is an independent woman and goes off on her own thing without question. Arturia likely follows her.
Nero may join in, may not and instead be with Shirou. It varies.
Medusa is pretty much tied to Sakura the same way Sakura's tied to Shirou.
Jordan either encounters Merlin, the "Doll" woman who makes homunculus, or just plain supports her on his own reserves. She's an assassin. Cheap as hell and he constantly hunts bad people she can drain, usually with a lot of prana to nab. They get married later on. Whether or not they can make children is up in the air, but it's not as if he's the heir of the family or anything.
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