Among the class containers, there are none better suited for close quarters combat than the Saber. Their reflexes tend toward the impressive even by supernatural standards. Their instinct is rarely wrong and enables baffling sight reads of opponent move sets in a way that makes them seem even faster than they are. And of course, to qualify for the class in the first place they must be paragons of the blade. In short: the skill to move a sword as though it were a third arm, the vision and the speed to respond to a mortal duelist after their strike had already reached the point of commitment, and the battle sense to shift out of the way of attacks that come directly from their blind spots. And all of this was just the container itself, before even considering the particulars of the legendary warriors that qualified to be summoned within it.
The strongest. So often the very last one standing, or at minimum the last of two. But nothing about this ambush is as pretty or effortless as these facts would lead an observer to believe.
The simple truth of it is that Saber is losing. Her sweeping, minimum effort combat style and oversized body both cut against her in a fight where her opponent might well number a thousand and can approach from as many angles with the advantage of perfect stealth and disguise. Sometimes she bends her sword as if it were liquid to catch an attack at an impossible angle and fling her assailant a full dozen meters away from her, but they never strike the ground. More often she steps into a long swing to bat down a handmaiden (what a violent term that has become since the ancient days) and takes a sharp cut across her back or her leg or an arm in the opening she leaves.
Being so long and so tall, even moving faster than all of her opponents still has her maneuvering in the outside circle, so to speak. She has further to travel and can only make herself so small in the end. There are always openings, and a perfectly choreographed attack will find them every time. Meanwhile the death screeching pounds her ears and disguises the movements of the warriors beyond her ability to get ahead of them with prediction. Impossible to even think straight, let alone make a play for the technomancy protecting the Baroness she keeps pinned to her shoulder through everything.
More than once she swings her prisoner instead of her sword, as though holding a shield that can ward off some of the pressure that is overwhelming her. But her prowess as a warrior seems at odds with this kind of desperate coward's tactics, and every time she shifts Fallweaver she also steps in a way that carries the woman away from the direction of attack and buries another knife in her own flesh, instead. She is accumulating a horrifying collection of them across the minutes she fights the swarm.
The one thing in her favor is that she has not been stopped from running. She continues speeding across the countryside, attempting to break free from the swarming, screaming flock. Wing travels faster than foot no matter how confident that foot may be, but in this way she is at least able to keep the jaws of the trap from swinging fully closed on her. She takes another step forward, and another, and another. They chase, and she leads. Suddenly she lifts Fallweaver over her head to the full extension of her massive arm. In that moment no fewer than four handmaidens pierce her from the cardinal directions in perfect synchronicity. It is a brutal attack, but such is war.
Here at last, Saber's wounds have become severe enough that it is possible to observe the miracle of them. It is not blood that seeps from the many openings left in her runecarved body. It is shadows: swirling darkness that swallows the light of her perfect compass and devours the hundred knives embedded in her flesh. As they drip to the ground, they spread around her feet until she is standing on a ragged pit of night. The metal has all melted on her skin; a hundred empty handles clatter to the ground, while a dorsal fin as sharp as one of Lancer's vaunted katanas glints on her back. The proof that she has given herself over and irrevocably to battle: her own approximation of wings.
She does not smile. Vengeance is not a sweet thing. There is no room for pleasure in the act and no point to it in the first place. There are only the endless calculations and sacrifices needed to make it happen, and the will to pursue it in the face of impossible odds. Saber cracks her neck. The braid that shifts along the ground and the hair atop her head has been completely drained of color. A gray that defies description, no longer faded gold but an attack on the mere idea of color. A void of hues bound in wrought iron clasps that offer sickening contrast to this impossible sight.
"Warriors," says the Valkyrie without hint of fatigue, anger, or pleasure, "I commend you. It was a trap well laid and a battle excellently fought. My lone sorrow as its witness is that you did not spring it on the one you meant to catch."
She jerks downward with surprising suddenness and plunges her ruined sword into the shadow-stained ground beneath her. The air fills with screaming of a kind that gives even southern birds something to aim for. Her grip on Fallweaver tightens.
"Noble Phantasm, partial activation."
When she tears her sword free again, it is whole and wrapped in runes that speak only of death and endless rivers of blood. And from the wound in the ground she leaves behind, the earth bleeds. Torrents of hot red liquid erupt in a wide circle, enough to catch the flock and even partially block its retreat. Everything is blind. Everything is pain. Everything is terror. Everything is red.
The rain falls, and feathers fall with it. It clears quickly, just a passing storm after all. But in the moment where the world resolves itself properly again and shudders at its torture, the Servant and her prisoner have vanished entirely.
