[Hereafter] Chapter CCLXIII: Atlas Institute (Patreon)

Chapter CCLXIII: Atlas Institute

I was startled awake suddenly and without warning. The howling storm still raged outside, battering at the fabric of our projected tent, but it was the urgent moving of the Servants that jolted me out of my sleep. Mash was already up and moving, armor fully manifested, shield clutched tightly in her hands, and facing a specific direction as though she noticed something no one else had.

Except everyone else had noticed it. Emiya, Okita, Ishtar, Sanzang, Touta, Altera, Shirou, Nero, and even Jackie, whose shifting must have been what actually woke me, they were all alert and all getting ready for whatever was coming, whatever was out there in the storm that had found us and was making its way towards us.

The sphinxes? Had they detected us somehow or just wandered close enough to notice we were here?

“Whazzat?” Rika slurred as Emiya shook her. “Summing ‘appen?”

“…to sleep, Rika,” her brother mumbled into his pillow. That lasted until Emiya glanced over at him and his pillow vanished into motes of light, letting his head drop suddenly to the floor.

“Master!” Mash said urgently. “There’s a Servant incoming!”

A surge of adrenaline shot through my veins — that woke everyone up. Even as I tossed the thin blanket aside and started climbing to my feet, the twins were doing the same, rolling off of their sleeping mats and stumbling upright. In the dim light of Emiya’s projected lantern, I groped around for my mask, and the instant I found it — laying next to my pillow, where I’d set it before we went to bed so I could grab it quickly if I had to — I jammed it on over my head.

“W-who?” Ritsuka asked. He and his sister were both fumbling with their goggles and breathing masks, scrambling to put them on as quickly as they could. “Where?”

“I-I don’t know for sure!” Mash said. “But whoever it is, this presence… It must be another Knight of the Round Table!”

“Another?” Rika squawked. “How many of them are there? How the hell did they find us out here in the middle of the goddamn desert!”

Mash could only shake her head. “I-I don’t know!”

Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they were out here for the exact same reason we were, the Atlas Institute, either to search for something they wanted or to deny us our own search, and they just happened to find us by total accident. Or maybe they had been tracking us since the wasteland, lost us in the storm, and had spent the last several hours trying to find us in the middle of this mess.

At the end of the day, it didn’t really matter, not right now. The hows and whys were things we could figure out later, when we had the time to actually dedicate to thinking about it more deeply. Right now, the enemy was on our doorstep, and we needed to be ready to face them.

“That’s just great!” said Sanzang. “I should have known things were going a little too smoothly! Of course a trial would appear in our path right as it seemed we were about to reach our destination!”

My equipment went on one piece at a time; the holster for my mana pistol, the sheath containing my Last Resort, my gloves, my jacket, my shoes, and as my magic circuits flicked on to the mental image of a spider thread snapping, my armor.

“You can lament it later,” Touta told her. “Right now, we need to be worried about what we’re going to do, because that guy is getting closer and we don’t have much time to plan. If you’re supposed to be my mentor, then stop whining and do some of that mentor stuff!”

The twins, a step behind me, pulled on their own gear now, too. I retrieved a line of silk thread and passed it over to them, and they set about securing that to themselves, too, because the last thing we wanted now was for one of us to get lost in this mess.

Sanzang huffed. “Mentor stuff, huh?  Well, it’s not like you’re wrong. We’re stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place, aren’t we?”

“You’re sure it’s a Knight of the Round Table?” Bedivere asked. In the light of the lantern, he looked even paler than usual, washed out, like his skin was thinner and weaker. The blood vessels beneath his eyes stood out like dirty, purple smudges.

Mash nodded. “I don’t think it’s one of the ones we fought before, but… The Heroic Spirit inside of me, he’s saying, this is one of my comrades! And I think…the Gift inside of him, the blessing of the Lion King, I can feel that, too!”

“Great. Awesome,” said Rika. “Did that guy offer anything useful about any of that, or do we have to guess? I don’t think we have time for twenty questions.”

Mash grimaced. “I’m sorry, Master,” she said like it was a personal failing. “All I’m getting is that faint impression. I can’t tell you anything more than that.”

Bedivere’s mouth pulled into a tight line. “Then we must fight, regardless.”

“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” said Sanzang.

Bedivere’s brow furrowed, frustrated. “If it is concern for what Lord Arash said, then please, put it from your mind. I will continue fighting for as long as my spirit allows. You need not worry for my limitations.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s where we are. If we get into a fight this close to the ruins —”

“— there’s a decent chance those sphinxes will notice and come running,” Emiya concluded, and then he scowled. “Damn. There’s no way we can hold all of them off and fight a Knight of the Round Table at the same time, especially if he’s bringing more of those Enforcement Knights along.”

“We’d better bet on it,” I said. He nodded, because the only Knight of the Round Table we’d fought so far who wasn’t accompanied by Enforcement Knights was Bertilak, and according to Bertilak himself, he didn’t even really count as a Knight of the Round Table. Whoever was coming almost certainly wouldn’t be alone.

“Then we need to make a break for it,” said Shirou.

“We still don’t know exactly where the entrance to the Atlas Institute is,” Ritsuka pointed out.

“I’ll send Jackie on ahead and she can search for it while we run,” I said.

“That’s all well and good, but I’m not sure that guy is going to let us get that far,” said Emiya.

We’d already spent enough time talking about it, so that was a fairly good point. Whoever it was that was coming after us would likely catch up before we could make it to the ruins and find the entrance to Atlas, and that would still put us in the position of having to fight a Knight of the Round Table from one angle and the sphinxes from the other.

Unless we played them against each other. 

“Then we lead him to the ruins and let him distract the sphinxes for us. While they’re busy fighting each other, we can slip away and find the Atlas Institute, and once we’re inside, set up a more defensible position.”

Emiya’s lips pursed. “Forcing everyone to come from one direction and putting them directly in front of us, ripe for any number of our Noble Phantasms. Yeah. That should work.”

Provided there wasn’t more than one entrance and either the sphinxes or the Knight took advantage of it to come after us from behind, but there was nothing we could do about that now. We’d just have to position Mash defending our rear and hope for the best otherwise.

“Right!” Sanzang pumped a fist, and then she whirled about and pointed in the direction of the tent’s entrance, only slightly off from the middle. “Then let’s get going! Atlas lies ahead of us!”

Ritsuka looked at her and then at her outstretched finger. “Is…that just a random guess or…?”

“Ah.” Sanzang stuttered. “W-well, I mean… It feels like the right way to go! Kind of. A little bit. It’s not like there’s some kind of voice shouting in my ear, ‘go that way!’ it’s just a feeling?”

A feeling from a Heroic Spirit famed for her journey following the guidance of what was probably some kind of Divine Spirit. I couldn’t say that it would be infallible, but it was better than having absolutely nothing to go on and stumbling around in the vague direction of a dot on a map we wouldn’t even be able to read. When I spared a glance at Ritsuka, he was looking back at me, and something like understanding passed between us.

“You’re leading the way,” I told her bluntly. (Her, “I am?” wasn’t answered.) To my daughter, I said, “Jackie, go. That direction, find the sphinxes, find the entrance to Atlas. Don’t get caught. We’ll catch up.”

Jackie, serious faced, nodded up at me and caught Da Vinci’s tarp of invisibility when Emiya tossed it her way. She slipped it over her shoulders and head like a cloak and disappeared from sight, and a moment later, the tent’s entrance opened to permit her exit.

I looked to the twins. “Are you two ready?”

They nodded. “As I’ll ever be,” Rika felt the need to add.

“H-he’s getting close!” Mash warned.

Shit.

“Sanzang, lead!” I said. “Emiya, drop this thing and let’s go!”

“Okay!” said Sanzang, and then whatever else she might have been about to say was swallowed by the storm as Emiya dismissed the projected tent. Immediately, any light disappeared with it, and the only source that provided any illumination at all was the pale light of the crescent moon above us, diffused and spread out and so dim in the sandstorm that it was barely enough to see my own hands in front of my face.

There was no choice. It might wind up giving us away, but I had to turn on my flashlight to have at least some idea of where Sanzang was, and a moment later, the twins turned theirs on, too, and three beams of white light pierced through the sand and the winds to find Sanzang’s back.

“Go!” I shouted, and I wasn’t sure if anyone heard me, but they obeyed all the same. Sanzang started off at a brisk pace, heading in the same direction she had pointed, and we followed her, sticking as close together as we could so that none of us got separated enough to need my silk tether.

In the dark, the desert and the storm felt far more treacherous than they had during the day. Every shadow on the whipping sand looked like it was something looming out of the dark, and every foothold felt less secure, like I could never be sure exactly where I was stepping. Time and distance seemed even less certain, and the presence of the Knight of the Round Table hounding our steps approached so close that I could feel it myself, nipping at our heels.

He, too, had to navigate these treacherous dunes, the howling wind, and the biting sand, and probably the only thing guiding his way was his own sense of our Servants and their presence amongst us. For a brief moment, I considered having some of them split off from the group and confuse our pursuers, but I discarded it almost immediately. That was a blatantly obvious tactic and there was no way whoever he was wouldn’t just split up his own forces to chase us all down.

We needed everyone we could hold onto and every advantage we could scrounge up. Hoping to split off some of the enemy’s forces and then call back ours with Command Spells would be a waste of Command Spells.

Somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard the neighing of a horse, but over the howling of the wind, it was impossible to tell if it was real or if I was just imagining it.

Eventually, we crested the top of a large dune, and as we began down the other side, the storm began to ease a little. It did not vanish completely, but the winds and the sand thinned out enough in the shelter of what soon revealed itself to be a valley amongst the dunes to see further down to what awaited below.

Sphinxes. A dozen, at least, hulking shadows moving amongst the sand throughout the valley, revealed beneath the pale gray haze of the moonlight filtering through the clouds above and the storm on the ground. They moved in what looked like patrol patterns through and around blocky, geometric shapes that cast their own shadows, irregular and lopsided, and those must have been the ruins.

“Senpai!” Ritsuka shouted.

“I see them!” I shouted back at him, and I seized hold of my bond with Jackie. Jackie, have you found the Atlas Institute?

No, Mommy, not yet, she replied.

Beneath my mask, I grimaced. Keep looking. Let us know when you find it.

We will, she said.

“There it is!” Sanzang said excitedly. It was only because of the flashlights still pointed at her back that I could even see her point down in the direction of the ruins. “See? That’s it right there!”

“Great!” said Touta. “Fantastic! Your intuition somehow managed to lead us right to where we needed to go! Has it given you any clues about how we’re going to get past all of those sphinxes?”

“Hey, just what are you even —”

Mash gasped. “Master!”

She flung herself to the back of our group, and I spun about just in time to watch something with a gleaming edge appear out of the dark to smash into her shield with a teeth-aching CLANG. Mash was sent backwards, but she blocked whatever it was that had attacked us from behind, and the force of it made her stumble on the sand. Ritsuka squawked when she backed up into him and lost his balance, and Rika and I had the same idea at the same time, because we reached out to steady him, only our own unsure footing gave out, and we were left backpedaling ourselves to keep from all three of us falling over. As a group, we slid almost a dozen feet down the side of the dune before we managed to stabilize ourselves.

“I finally managed to catch up with you.”

And there, standing near the top, was a shadow in the shape of a man. Rika’s flashlight swung up to illuminate him, but I didn’t need it to recognize the voice that came out of it, because we’d heard that voice before, months and months ago, offering his apologies for why he would not be joining us at Chaldea.

“Sir Lancelot,” said Bedivere, naming him for me.

When Rika’s flashlight landed on the shadow, it revealed a man, a tall, handsome man in dark, purple armor carrying a familiar sword in his hand. The armor was the same style he had worn back in Septem, the same design, only the colors now were different. Even Arondight had been dyed from the shining, golden-hilted sword to a thing of reds and purples, ugly like a bad bruise. The idea that he had stained himself from the gallant knight in shining armor he had been then by following the monstrous orders of the Lion King would have been hilariously ridiculous if it didn’t seem to be true.

All of our Servants formed up on us Masters, tensed and ready to fight the instant violence broke out in earnest.

“Indeed, I am Lancelot, a Knight of the Round Table, here on the orders of the king to capture the rebels who have been causing such trouble,” said Lancelot. “And you…” His brow furrowed; he ignored the rest of us and looked straight at Bedivere. “You are… It can’t be. This must be some kind of trick. An illusion.”

“I assure you, I am no illusion,” said Bedivere. “Even were it so that I was, it would not change the question I must ask you, one Knight of the Round Table to another. Sir Lancelot. For what reason do you serve the Lion King?”

“What?” said Lancelot.

“Sir Gawain is chivalry personified. He would gladly damn himself for the sake of the king,” said Bedivere. “Sir Yvain looked upon the people slaughtered and spoke of necessary sacrifices. Sir Tristan called it mercy. And you, Sir Lancelot? Would you gaze upon that light that has destroyed so many villages in this land and call it King Arthur’s justice? Would you say that this is the path we Knights of the Round Table should be walking?”

Lancelot closed his eyes for a brief moment. None of us mistook it for a moment of weakness we might exploit.

“You are surrounded, Sir Bedivere,” he said at length, and as though they had been summoned by his words, Enforcement Knights astride horses materialized like shadows along the crest of the dune. “You may fight or you may surrender. I will treat you accordingly depending upon that decision.”

“I would have your answer first!” Bedivere barked. “Sir Lancelot! Why do you serve the Lion King? Why does a knight like you condone such barbarism? Answer me!”

“I swore myself to King Arthur, not to the Lion King!” Lancelot bit out. “The light of judgment that destroys these villages… No, I would not call it King Arthur’s justice! However!” He brandished his sword at Bedivere. “That has no bearing upon my duty now. If you have grievances to air with His Majesty, you may do so to his face! You do a disservice to yourself, your king, and your comrades to skulk about with these people out here in the wastes and nip at our heels!”

No way. I hadn’t taken the idea too seriously back when it was first suggested a couple days ago, but was it actually possible for us to convince Lancelot to come over to our side?

“You mean I do a disservice to Agravain and his plots!” Bedivere retorted. “Even one as ignorant as I can see his machinations at work in your pursuit of us into this desert!”

“Enough!” said Lancelot. “Sir Bedivere, will you yield, or do you intend to fight?”

Bedivere drew his sword and brandished it at Lancelot. “I will do what I must, Sir Lancelot. If you mean to stand athwart me, then I shall have no choice but to go through you as well.”

“And we shall help him!” Nero declared. “Mm-mm! You shall not have so easy a time of it, Sir Lancelot!”

Lancelot’s face darkened. “I see there is no reasoning with you, then.” He raised his free hand, and the shadows arrayed behind him in a line that seemed to stretch from one end of the dune to the other shifted. “Men, prepare for battle! We shall be detaining these rebels! Sir Agravain will determine their fates back at the Holy City!”

A chorus of acknowledging shouts answered him, and I cast a glance up and down the line, but there was no way to tell exactly how many of those Enforcement Knights he had brought with him. More than a dozen, at least, because it seemed he had learned from that fight with Yvain back in the wasteland.

Fortunately, Yvain didn’t seem to be here with him, this time. We didn’t have to worry about Lewyn or that ring of invisibility, which would make him all but impossible to detect under these conditions.

There were still more than enough of those Enforcement Knights for me to think we didn’t want to try fighting them like this, let alone on the treacherous footing of a sand dune that had already slid out from underneath us. The old plan still applied.

“Run for it!” I shouted, and then I hauled Ritsuka around with me as I turned and made for the ruins as quickly as I could. It took him an extra second to secure his footing, but he and Rika were hot on my heels.

As though that was some kind of signal, the tense standoff broke, and everyone surged into action. I heard the Enforcement Knights charge and Lancelot’s sword bounce off of Mash’s shield once more, but Emiya was ready for it and summoned up a wave of ordinary looking swords that hovered in midair for a heartbeat before shooting off into the dark to slam into the pursuing knights with a series of echoing, metallic clangs. I didn’t stop to turn and check how many he managed to kill with that, if he even managed to kill any at all, because if it was that easy, he would have done it before now. I just kept running.

The way down the slope was treacherous and slowed us down, and every step felt uncertain and unsteady, like my feet were wobbling beneath me, but I corrected and kept going. Ritsuka and Rika were right there with me, only a step behind, and the clashing of steel rang out as the Servants covered our retreat. Sanzang and Touta went ahead, acting as a vanguard in case any of the sphinxes got too close and had ideas we didn’t like.

The sandstorm wasn’t as bad in the valley where the ruins rested, but in the dark, it was still difficult to see anything too far ahead of us. The beams of our flashlights flicked across the ground and the space ahead of us in jerky, unreliable arcs, revealing short glimpses of what waited for us, but there was nothing more reliable to tell exactly where we were going and what we should expect.

Eventually, however, the ground began to even out. The steeper slope of the dune slowly transitioned to something flatter and easier to walk on, and it was actually something of an accident when the first signs of the ruins came into view on the pass of my flashlight. I saw it only for an instant, a beige pillar that jutted out of the sand, stretching up some fifteen feet or so before the top edges became jagged and uneven, softened only by time and the wind.

“We’re —”

I didn’t have time to let everyone know. A dark shape flew past me with an aborted scream, and Mash’s body continued for another twenty feet or so before she landed and rolled to a stop. For a second, as she lay there, my heart stopped and I feared the worst, and then she pushed herself up and used her shield to lever herself onto her feet.

“Mash!” Ritsuka cried.

“Master!” Mash shouted. “Get behind me! W-we have to retreat into the ruins as quickly as we can! This isn’t a fight we can win on open ground!”

Another body went flying, and Mash gasped and turned her shield to the side so she could reach out and brace Bedivere before he could roll past her. He let out a strangled yell and nearly folded over backwards over her outstretched arm, gasping and panting. He was not as fast to get back up on his feet as Mash had been; when she reached him, Sanzang picked him up and slung his real arm over her shoulders, and he groaned as she hauled him back to standing.

“Come on!” she said. “No sleeping on the job, Sir Bedivere! I’ll toss you over my shoulder and carry you the whole way, don’t think I won’t!”

Bedivere tried to shrug her off. “I-I can still…!”

“Not in that condition, you can’t!” she told him. “I really will pick you up and carry you if you try to turn around and go back to fighting that guy!”

Bedivere could only hang his head and let himself be half-dragged forward.

The instant the twins and I had passed Mash, she firmed up her stance, and behind us, she shouted against the world, “Lord Chaldeas!”

The curtain wall rose and cast a blue glow that played across the ground for another dozen yards or so, and it lit up the vague shapes in the ruins even clearer than they had been. They were still little more than lumps with outlines done in silvery gray and pale blue, but the structure of the buildings around us became something that started to make actual sense. What it was I was looking at, I still wasn’t sure, and even in broad daylight, it might not have made any sense to me. But I could see it. The suggestion of what might once have been a building, a temple or the ancient equivalent of a mansion. Pillars that might have supported the roof or simply formed decoration.

And then, a horrible screech made even me stop and turn to look, just in time to watch Lancelot drag his sword down the surface of Lord Chaldeas the rest of the way. It let out a whine not unlike a chainsaw, if someone was trying to use that chainsaw to cut through a boulder, and before my eyes —

“Holy shit,” said Rika.

— a clean line spread along the arc of Lancelot’s swing, stretching from the top to the bottom of Lord Chaldeas and its curtain wall. Amidst the glow of that ghostly barrier, another light glowed brighter and brighter and brighter, bright enough that the polarized lenses in my mask had to adjust it to keep from hurting my eyes. 

That… That was the same Noble Phantasm that had dealt a fatal blow to Arash.

With a thunderous boom, the line exploded, and the curtain wall that had stood up to almost everything that had ever been used against it cracked, split, and shattered as though it was cheap plywood. Mash let out a cry as the backlash threw her backwards and towards us, and she tumbled and slid across the ground, but managed to get her legs back beneath her by the time she skidded to a halt.

Thankfully, she didn’t seem injured, at least not anything that was bleeding. Whether she had taken any other kind of damage from that attack, I couldn’t say.

“He broke through Lord Chaldeas,” Ritsuka said, shocked. “The only one who ever did that was…”

“Is that all you can muster?” Lancelot demanded. “You rebel against the Lion King with his power in your body and his shield in your hands, and that is all the more of his strength you can summon to fight me? Sir Bedivere! These are the allies you have chosen?”

Shirou appeared behind him almost as though he had teleported, arms wound back and sword prepared to swing, but Lancelot reacted like he had eyes in the back of his head; he stepped back and to the side, reached out with his free hand, and took hold of Shirou’s wrist to use it as a lever. Shirou’s feet left the ground, and Lancelot spun him around and threw him into Emiya, sending them both into the sand in a tangle of limbs.

Nero was handled with similar ease. He stepped out of the path of her sword, ducked beneath the whip-like blade of Altera’s, and stuck his leg in the path of Nero’s ankle. As Nero stumbled, trying to maintain her balance, Arondight came around, aimed at her neck.

“Emergency Evasion!” Rika chanted hurriedly, and the purpled blade slipped around Nero’s neck to slam into the ground and kick up a plume of sand. Undaunted, Lancelot seized her by the back of her dress, hauled her up as though she was weightless, and threw her into Okita. His sword came around, and the flat blocked Ishtar’s shots, and then he swung it around and smashed it into Altera’s guard with enough force to lift her off the ground and send her back a dozen feet.

He was dismantling us. This was the knight said to have fought Gawain for hours beneath the light of the morning sun, wielding nothing but pure skill and an indestructible sword against the kind of power that had killed even Siegfried with one blow.

Abruptly, Lancelot disappeared, and then, suddenly, he was in front of us, in front of Mash, and his sword slammed down onto the surface of her shield with a teeth-aching CLANG. She gasped and her knees threatened to buckle, but she held her ground, even as her shield shook from the effort of holding Lancelot back.

“Surrender!” he demanded. “It is my preference to take all of you alive to stand judgment before the Lion King, but I will take your lives if I must!”

A pair of twin blades spun through the air like buzzsaws, aimed for Lancelot’s neck, and he turned around to deflect them with contemptuous ease — but Emiya had already summoned his bow, a familiar spiralling arrow formed along the string.

“Mash!” he shouted. “Shield up! Now!”

Mash planted her feet. “Lord Chaldeas!”

The familiar curtain wall formed again, translucent, solid, a barrier standing between us and Lancelot. At this range, in the dark, it was almost impossible to see Emiya’s lips, but I knew what he would say even as he was saying it.

“My core is twisted in madness. Caladbolg!”

Space twisted. The arrow left Emiya’s bow like a rocket, crossing the intervening distance before I could blink so that the only thing I could see was the trail it left behind.

A metallic CLANG echoed. The arrow deflected up into the air, spinning end over end until it disappeared into the haze of the sandstorm, and somewhere above us, somewhere out of sight, a new sun bloomed. The light it produced pierced briefly through the storm, and for a second, as the shockwave disrupted the winds and the flying debris and created a hole amidst the chaos, everything around us was cast in a bright, orange glow. And then the glow faded, and we were back in the dark of the predawn hours.

“You are more dangerous,” Lancelot began to say, but before he could finish, another shape flitted through the space Caladbolg had just traveled, and Shirou came in swinging. Lancelot blocked him effortlessly, holding back his two-handed swing with only a single hand on Arondight.

“Did you expect me to be taken in by such a simple trick?” Lancelot said. “You cannot hope to defeat the Lion King with a sword of this caliber!”

Shirou didn’t even flinch. “Then let me show you what caliber of sword this is by cutting away her Gift. Zenryou Jyouyaku —”

A sudden shockwave ripped through the whole valley, and the sandstorm cleared, revealing the enormous visage of Nitocris cast against the sky above and looking down on us with stern disapproval. 

“Scoundrels!” her voice thundered. “Intruders! How dare you desecrate the Great Pharaoh’s most sacred land with such violence and savagery! I, Nitocris, who has been granted stewardship of this Atlas Institute, do repudiate you for this trespass! Surrender yourselves to my judgment or leave at once!”

The Enforcement Knights — who had been descending the dune to rejoin the fight that our Servants had fled in order to help Mash and Bedivere — stumbled to a stop, startled, and stared up at her as though they had all seen a ghost. I’d thought they were more like machines than people before. Could they actually be frightened after all?

“Queen Nitocris!” Mash cried.

“She really did come to help us after all!” said Rika, something like relief on her face.

“S-Sir Lancelot!” one of the Enforcement Knights stuttered. “Is that…the giant His Majesty said slumbered in this desert fourteen-thousand years ago?”

Lancelot threw Shirou off and spat at the knight in question, “Don’t be fooled! That is no giant, it is only an illusion created through magecraft! She is projecting it remotely to prey upon your fears! Maintain formation! Ignore that woman and continue fighting!”

Nitocris’ eyes turned towards us and she scowled. “What are you waiting for? This is no time to be gawking! Gather yourselves and run!”

As though that was some kind of signal, the sphinxes that had been prowling about the ruins began to converge upon our spot, and they made a beeline, not for us, but for Lancelot and his Enforcement Knights. I thought, for a second, of taking advantage of the moment to capitalize on Lancelot’s distraction and land a decisive blow, and then I watched him decapitate the first sphinx to reach him as though it was nothing more than a rabid dog, and that idea died a swift death.

“Come on!” I said to the others. “Let’s go!”

Lancelot watched our Servants abandon everything else and come towards us for a single second, and then his eyes turned to the incoming parade of sphinxes and he made a decision, the same sort of decision I would have made in his circumstances.

I turned and followed the twins, who had already begun making their way towards where Bedivere, Touta, and Sanzang had gone.

“Form up!” Lancelot shouted. “Square formation! We will deal with the sphinxes before renewing pursuit!”

We left him and his Enforcement Knights to deal with the sphinxes. I heard more than saw Emiya make an attempt at a few potshots, but the sound of their deflection was just barely audible over the other sounds of combat and violence, so he abandoned that and fell into line at the rear, guarding our retreat. The dark swallowed them before long, but without the sandstorm, it was easier to see where we were going and easier to link up with Sanzang, Touta, and Bedivere, who had all stopped and huddled in the shadow of the central building that still jutted out of the sand. If I was a betting woman, that was where I would have thought the entrance to the Atlas Institute would be.

There was just one problem: if it existed, it was buried.

Two and two came together to give me four, and the obvious answer presented itself: the sandstorms that had plagued this desert had been blowing almost nonstop for months and months. Metric tons of sand had been thrown about and deposited, and here, at the bottom of a valley between the dunes, it would have built up the most. If this was indeed the location of the entrance to the Atlas Institute, then it had been buried beneath all of this sand for longer than we had been inside of this Singularity, and it had only been piling up more since.

“It should be here, shouldn’t it?” said Sanzang. “This is where it makes the most sense, doesn’t it? But I don’t see an entrance to anything!”

“I…think I have an idea about why you don’t,” Ritsuka said. 

Rika groaned. “What are we supposed to do? Gramps sent us here to learn stuff in the Atlas Institute! How are we supposed to do that if we can’t even get in?”

Jackie? I ventured across the bond, and before I could ask anything else, the air nearby suddenly had a head of ashy gray hair floating above it.

“Here, Mommy,” she said.

Aloud, I asked, “Did you find anything?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. We couldn’t find a way in, Mommy. It’s all buried.”

Under who knew how much sand weighing who knew how much, all of it impossible to move with any speed under the circumstances. There was no way we could reasonably dig our way down to where we thought the entrance was in the time we had before Lancelot and his Enforcement Knights killed all of the sphinxes that were even now attacking them.

We might not have any choice except to fight. Given everything we’d already attempted throwing at him and his own level of ability? Our best bet was probably to put as much distance between us as we could and have Ishtar destroy them all with her Noble Phantasm. If Lancelot could survive that, then we were in a whole lot more trouble than I had given him credit for.

“There has to be a way in,” said Ritsuka, pacing restlessly. His head swung back and forth between the pillars that jutted up around us as though something carved into them might have an answer. “The First Hassan knew enough to tell us where to go and what to look for while we were here. He knew the Atlas Institute had been summoned alongside Ozymandias and his desert. There’s no way he would send us here if he didn’t know there was a way for us to get inside, too!”

Those were all very good points. Despite my frustrations with his stupid test and everything he’d put us through while we were at his shrine, I could acknowledge that Ritsuka was right about how well-informed the First Hassan had been about what we needed to go looking for inside the Atlas Institute and how relevant it was to our mission. The only trouble was, whatever the First Hassan had intended and however much he knew, he hadn’t done us the favor of telling us how to get where we needed to go or what secret passage we needed to exploit to reach it.

“If we can’t find the way in, then we don’t have a choice about what to do next,” I told him. “We’ll have to fight Lancelot.”

“I know!” he bit out, and he stalked angrily over towards the buried building. Something deep rumbled, so subtly that I wasn’t even sure I wasn’t imagining it, and then the sand beneath his feet began to shift and vibrate. “I know —”

My heart stuttered in my chest.

“Ritsuka!”

He stumbled, and then, suddenly, sank into the sand like a rock dropped in a pond. It was like quicksand in the movies, only sped up even more, and by the time anyone realized what was happening, he was already waist deep and sinking lower.

“Master!” Mash shouted, and she dove for him, reaching for his hand, only the sand she landed on swallowed her up just as quickly.

“Mash!” Rika cried, but Mash and Ritsuka had both vanished before she even finished the name.

Just as suddenly, the ground beneath my own feet began to rumble and shake, and my legs dropped to the knee through the sand so fast that I didn’t even have time to try and jump away. By the time my brain caught up, I was already up to my waist, and then my chest, and the sand pressing in from all sides was like mud — impossible to pull myself free, impossible to lift myself out of, and just trying only made me sink faster.

“Master!” Emiya shouted at the same time as Jackie’s desperate, “Mommy!”

“Emiya!” I heard Rika say, panicked, and I reached out with my arm as Jackie dove to the ground to pull me up. Her tiny fingers wrapped tight around my palm, as firm as steel and twice as unyielding.

But she wasn’t spared either. She sank with me, hand still clasped in mine as the sand rose up to swallow my shoulders, and then my head. The last thing I heard was Sanzang, shouting, “It’s a trap! It’s a pitfall trap!” before I was surrounded on all sides by the crushing darkness of the desert sands.

For several long seconds, I was squeezed down through the sinking sand, and then, I reached the bottom, and Jackie and I were spat out into another kind of darkness, one free of that suffocating pressure. I landed on something soft and pillowy and immediately began sliding down — towards what, I had no idea, only that the incline was gentle enough that I wouldn’t break my ankles at the bottom, even without Da Vinci’s soft landing function. The sand beneath me whooshed as it slid with me, beneath me, and somewhere in the dark, Rika’s voice screamed.

Eventually, we hit the bottom of whatever this was and wherever we were going, and it was so unexpected that my legs weren’t prepared to take my weight. I went tumbling, first onto a cushion of sand, and as I drew Jackie into my arms to protect her, onto something harder and firmer that definitely gave me a bruise or two. A second later, Rika reached the bottom, too, and she tumbled over herself somewhere nearby with a startled, “Oof!”

Slowly and carefully, I unwound myself from around Jackie and reached out with one hand, groping around in the dark. When my flashlight was no longer blocked, the beam shone upon a ceiling made of stone bricks, an ancient edifice that reminded me both of the tunnels of the Mage’s Association in London and the prison built beneath the fort we had blown off the face of the map.

As I pulled myself to my feet, cataloguing the aches and pains that I had collected, several more thumps landed nearby, heralded by Sanzang’s girlish squeal. My flashlight swung around and revealed all of our other Servants, including a very disgruntled Ishtar.

“Ugh!” she said crossly. She tried her best to comb sand out of her hair with her fingers, to middling success. “When I get my hands on whoever set this whole thing up…!”

“Are we all here?” Shirou asked, raising his voice to carry.

I swung my flashlight around the other way. Rika, still trying to pull herself onto her feet, raised a hand and groaned out, “P-present!”

Ritsuka groaned, too. “I’m here!”

“M-me, too!” said Mash, and when the little gremlin poked his head out, she added, “Fou, as well!”

I turned the beam of my flashlight further — and froze. My mind raced. Shit. Fuck. Too close. If this turned violent, Ritsuka was right there, and Mash might not have enough time to rush to his defense.

“Who are you?” I demanded of the stranger standing just beyond our group.

Slicked back hair. A duster that looked like it could have come out of a cowboy movie or maybe an old detective movie. A curved tobacco pipe in one hand and the head of a cane held in the other. A pale-skinned face smiled, and I distrusted it on principle.

“Excellent,” he said crisply. “It seems everyone escaped without injury.”

“My butt still hurts,” Rika said flatly.

“Without major injury,” the stranger corrected. “Shall I get the lights, as they say?”

He did something, something I didn’t catch, and an instant later, every torch in every brazier arrayed along the walls lit up with crackling flames. The room around us was suddenly illuminated — the twins hissed as their eyes were forced to adjust to the unexpected light — to reveal a rotunda not unlike the one in that fort’s prison, where we had been faced with a number of doors leading to a number of hallways. Behind us, a pile of sand from where we had all come in led up and into the dark of what I was sure must have been some kind of bounded field meant to protect the entrance, and in front of us, the stranger and the dealer’s choice of which corridor would go where we needed.

“Was it you who brought us down here?” asked Ritsuka.

“Indeed, it was,” said the stranger. He took a puff of his pipe. “Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Atlas Institute. My apologies for the method and for any lingering discomfort, but I’m afraid I didn’t have a more convenient means of facilitating your ingress. As for the question of my identity…”

He took another puff of his pipe, then let it out in a cloud of thin, gray smoke. Jackie’s nose wrinkled, and mine did, too, even though I couldn’t smell it through my mask.

“My name is Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective,” he said. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Rika summed up what I thought must have been everyone’s thoughts, just then:

“No fucking way.”

Of course the getaway wasn't clean. Of course Holmes is here. Of course things aren't quite the same with him, and for very good reason. But the true stars of this little part of the show will be in the next couple of chapters, where I get to have a lot of fun. Someone has a debt to pay off, after all, and a certain god was keeping tally.

The editor was a little bit frustrated editing this, because it felt like the team was kind of hopeless against Lancelot, but... I mean, Taylor says it in the narration, this is the same guy who held his own against a Gawain who could kill Siegfried in one blow. Lancelot is kinda nutty.

Of course, he wouldn't have survived having a planet shot into his face, but that's a very select club to begin with, so we can't fault him for that.