[h1][center][b][color=0054a6]Reiki Matou[/color][/b][/center][/h1]
[h3][center]The Study, Matou Manor --> Fuyuki Park[/center][/h3]
[hr]
She had been ready. Her familiars mobilized for a new tactic against the blaze, Scáthach and the Tohsaka's Saber both at hand, bags packed in case the retaliation failed, and Shinji safely out of the area. Of course, with some tiny grain of clarity and control found in this wild situation, it was guaranteed something was bound to bungle it up.

That said, she hadn't been expecting it to be an [i]ally[/i] that did it.

Saber had fled instantly. At the same time, Lancer came crashing in through the office window, wordlessly grabbed Reiki in one arm and her suitcase in the other, and continued through the hallway towards the back wall. She didn't crash through this wall, however. It parted into a swarm of winged insects at her approach, allowing her to land on the grass and progress over the wall.

Reiki hardly missed a beat. She hadn't been expecting to enact escape maneuvers until some effort had been put into her fire extinguishing plan and it had proven ineffective, but she was nonetheless prepared. Final orders were given to the various groups of familiars. Those on and around the lawn piled into the gazebo, those in the basement packed tightly and sought out the lowest crevasses, and those spread through the edges of the fire zone in position for firefighting simply fled and survived as best they could. The last was a vague order to evade and resist. Many would likely scatter to the winds, while some might collect and morph into more durable collective forms.

Her final commands having been laid out, Reiki cut ties with the lot of them.

She was jolted out of her familiar-control focus as Lancer rubbed a bit of ash on her cheek, clearly making to form a primordial rune. She had no time to ask about its nature before it came into effect, at which point Scáthach began moving at full tilt.

For Reiki, this was an impossible speed. She was used to an immense amount of simultaneous sensory experiences, but not so for incredible single concentration like this. As the flames became more scarce and the foreigners' houses zipped by, she realized the rune on her face was certainly a physical reinforcement rune, for there was no other way she could have survived in such a state. 

She heard the explosion from the manor behind them, and then she saw it overhead. Lancer's greatest work. The gazebo.

It was unrecognizable. Walls of stone and ice enveloped it in an airtight egg shielding it from the great explosion, no doubt carefully aimed by Scáthach, that had erupted beneath the structure back on the lawn, sending it flying through the air at an angle that made its destination likely similar to their own. As she understood the masterpiece Lancer had toiled over for no small part of the time before the war, gravitational runes stabilizing the internal cabin would keep her worms intact despite the force of the flight while wind-force runes laid around the outer edges would repel the cure-ridden smoke of the flames that had started this whole problem.

Far behind the pair, she supposed, would be the barriers Lancer had claimed could withstand the release of a Noble Phantasm. They would be growing more and more numerous, appearing directly on top of each other until the border of the lawn became so saturated with energy that it was nothing more than a wall of blinding white light. Despite this, she was acutely aware of the difference in power between the barriers and the thing descending from above, and so there was no need for her to ask Lancer why she was not relying on those shields to keep them safe.

While Reiki had been boosted to withstand the speeds at which Scáthach travelled, her sense of time remained the same, and so it was a matter of a few seconds, hardly time to formulate any thought or response to the situation, before her Servant brought them to a stop just beside a park bench.

There was a quiet moment then. Lancer's focused gaze indicated she was likely using Clairvoyance to assess the damage and watch for nearby opportunists, but Reiki let her familiars run themselves for just a few seconds while she collected her thoughts.

It was an impossible tragedy. Even if she won the grail for Zouken and lived to see everlasting peace, this failure would likely gnaw at her for a long time.

Of course, the blame hardly fell on her shoulders alone. Jack, that Demon with her followers, the lightning wielder who had defended her, the woman who had poisoned the flames, and...

[color=0054a6]"What was that!? If Benita hasn't gone fully rogue, we'll be having a very [i]serious[/i] talk about teammate coordination.[/color]