Naoko felt it too, the vacuum of power left after Rider unleashed her onslaught, the certainty that her Servant had done something right. The exhaustion didn’t matter. The fatigue didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except for this instance in time.

She pressed on.

She did not slow down.

As the knee crumbled beneath the force of her kick, the enemy master pressed on regardless, a berserker in her own right. Already, flesh and bone were knitting back together, a mess of cancerous cells that almost seemed to cling onto Naoko’s boot. Raised high and burning as bright as a star was the overcharged Noble Phantasm the vine-witch thought to destroy her with, the corporeal form of the weapon already bursting at the seams. Bursting with scarlet and bound by reckless rage were her commandments to her Servant, pushing the mad warrior to further extremes. And the vines had unfurled again, thorny whips poised to tear through leather and flay off the skin beneath.

But Naoko was already moving, shifting her weight onto the foot already pressed against Katherine’s knee. Maintaining the momentum of her kick, she spun, rotating her body past the Enforcer’s as the dagger struck air. She span through the air, her left foot surging up and catching the vines in spaces between the thorns, a round-about trajectory that mashed them altogether before she kicked off the knee, delivering a spinning kick to the back of the vine-witch’s skull while simultaneously pulverizing the plants against it.

If that bitch wanted to go forward, she could.

Right off the edge.

Naoko flew the opposite direction, tumbling safely before hopping back onto her feet.

[b]“Sophie, need me to get you out?”	[/b]

Already, the sigil upon the back of her hand glowed. To hold up against a Berserker empowered by a command spell was impressive. To do so with two? Unreasonable.

But Empresses and Mages alike were unreasonable.