Ruins, wreckage, and the dead. If she had known things were going to look that bad, Naoko would have rented a shovel from the hardware store before coming over. Alas, most of the finery of the estate ended up smashed, and its unfortunate occupants…
The girl knelt down beside the corpse of another unlucky guard, gently closing his lightless eyes. Even this far out of town, the Grail War claimed the lives of the uninvolved, huh? Naoko clicked her tongue and stood up again, wiping the dust off her pants as Sophie called for her.

[b]“Wow, think if we sold these, we’d like, be set for life, huh?”[/b] Naoko remarked upon seeing the regalia. It looked way to ostentatious for her own taste, after all, and royal heirlooms had a nasty habit of backfiring on those who tried using them without the proper blood flowing through their veins, sadly, so really, all this was just money. Or an alliance with the rich boy who’d be searching for it. She helped Sophie (at least verbally) haul the entire box back into the Winter Palace, sliding it beside the refrigerator before stepping in.

[b]“Yeah,”[/b] she waved, [b]“Go for it, Sophie. I’ll just see if I can get some more work done on the dude’s leg.”[/b]

And with that, Naoko pulled out her first aid kit, rolled up her sleeve, and made him go to sleep before he could say much in the way of protesting. Wouldn’t want him to be awake, after all, when she started sewing.

[hr]

Sometime later, shit hit the fan in the form of a Servant with such an impressive aura that even a middling mage like Naoko could feel it in the back of her truck. Rich people were rich after all, but could the Habsburgs actually have summoned something like Archer Hercules? Judging by the aura of death, something that affected even the unconscious guard as he fidgeted slightly in his sleep, yeah, that was pretty fucking likely. There was a good two hundred meter distance between the Winter Palace and that walking nuclear bomb, and the tall trees created a good amount of visual cover as well, but those didn’t matter at all in the presence of that Servant. Sophie was special, but this?

…

Well, Naoko wasn’t the praying type, so what could she do but her best?

Dragging the rosewood box towards her, she positioned it right by the driver’s seat before buckling herself in. The guard was strapped down in the back as well, his leg now bandaged up properly, the tourniquet tossed in her organic compost bin. Glancing in the rearview mirror and catching a glimpse of Sophie between two broken-down walls, Naoko took a breath, imagined her body as something as fluid as a gentle stream, and turned the ignition key.

[i]‘I’ll burn a Command Spell to call you back whenever you need me to. Have fun on your date, Sophie!’[/i]

No regrets. Let's have some fun.

She drove off, casually, unassumingly. The roar of an engine was a dead giveaway regardless of how hard she hit the gas, after all.