Fore!
It was reflex action, really. The first thing she'd heard upon coming back to had been unfamiliar voices, the first thing she'd felt had been restrains, both physical and mystical, that were supposed to keep her bound and immobile.
No normal person would have managed it. No normal Magi either.
Illyasviel von Einzbern was far from normal, though. She'd been _born_ for the sole purpose of fighting in the War. Mystical restrains that would stop or at least hamper Magi severely had less effect on someone whose body was, for all intents and purposes, a collection of Magic Circuits. Some Magi spent their lives seeking power, while she, from a certain point of view, was power incarnate.
It was one of the reasons why she'd not gone insane under the constant mental pressure of having had a bond to ...
... Berserker ...
... she'd almost called out, despite being aware of the futility of said action on a level more intimate than was possible for non-magic users. To a being like her, the lack of Reiju that had been almost integrated into the intricacies of her own Magic Circuits by then, was like the sudden lack of a limb.
The only being she'd _known_ cared for her, even if its way of doing so had been crude, simplistic, and basically centered around the concept of 'you hurt Master. you die!', was gone.
There were many variables that decided how efficiently a Magic Circuit could direct mana, or with how much capacity it could do so. The emotional state of the was one such variable.
The realization of captivity, the trauma of knowing that someone had taken her only 'friend' from her ...
What followed was rather like the result of setting off an explosive charge in an enclosed space.
***
Heinrich Krause was no longer concerned. He'd gone past that a few moments ago, headed past 'worried', and somehow wound up stopping at 'furious'.
True, he'd initially only been ordered to observe, but his patrons in the Association hadn't limited themselves to that, and while their suggestions were not strictly within the limits set by his motherhouse's directives ...
... well, everybody and their dog knew that those were more like guidelines anyway, unless you were actually inept enough to get caught breaking them.
A Magi was only worth as much as his ambition was powerful, or so the old proverb stated.
Traditionally, the War was not to be interfered with.
Tradition, though, only applied when it could be made useful. Heinrich was priviliged enough that his patrons had enlightened him.
Power is power.
And Heinrich had always been quite ambitious.
He'd always been very good at his job, both official and not, else his patrons wouldn't have had him sent to Fuyuki in the first place.
They'd located the Einzbern homonculus early on, they'd bided their time, they'd taken advantage of a situation that, whilst dangerous, had also served them their target on a silver platter.
The Gods had gone ahead and given Heinrich the boon of a short sighted adversary, something he'd always been fond of. The strike team wouldn't have been able to directly overwhelm the Matou brat _and_ his Servant ... or Servants, but they'd not been required to.
All it had taken was a little pressure, posturing, and acting for him to hand over the 'useless, now that she doesn't have Reiju' girl to 'her Einzbern bodyguards'.
Sniveling coward. How people like that were able to become Masters in the first place, Heinrich didn't know and didn't much care.
Now, though ... now things were not looking all that rosy.
They'd brought the homonculus back, retrieved restrains that would hold even Heinrich himself - he'd though this with more than a little pride, since he'd been the one to design them - and were about to secure it in a null-zone cell ...
There was nothing left of the two apprentices who'd been assigned this task, save scraps of meat and bone splattered over the walls of said cell.
And now that subhuman _thing_ was loose in their facility - if she were to get out, things would become distinctly unpleasant for the Magi present. If not directly, then when the reports came in.
Doctoring them was always an option, he knew, but things like that had a nasty habit of coming to light under the Questors of the Association. The Clock Tower in particular.
"Sir! We have it!" one of the apprentices tied into the facility's wards exclaimed, unfocused eyes tracking movement he alone was seeing. "The locking and containment wards of the outer storage chambers have been tripped."
Well, that was a mixed blessing. Hopefully, it could be captured and contained before it caused too much of a mess.
***
... there was only darkness.
She jerked in surprise at the sudden shift in surroundings, finally regaining some semblance of sanity again.
Not that she'd been entirely out of it, but she realized that she hadn't exactly thought in terms other than immediate survival after managing to free herself.
She'd been running on desperation, sorrow, anger ... and had recognized that, the fluctuations in power it brought - so she'd taken the path of most resistance, hoping to bring her captors' strength and numbers down by as much as she could before those aftereffects left her a burned out mess.
How that reasoning had caused her to break the strongest ward she could sense in her vicinity, she couldn't exactly tell, though she'd left a trail of broken Magi and Apprentices in her wake in the process.
It wasn't much of a chamber to look at, the place she'd gone into - shelves, shelves, and nothing but steel supports and shelves. And cardboard. The occasional crate. The _contents_, though, were powerful to her senses. Plain as a star on a cloudless country night.
Then pursuit had caught up, and she was dodging, forcing more power through her Circuits, and flinging it towards the newcomers.
What she'd been made for.
In a flash of hindsight, Illya realized the display had cost her a few years of her already stretched existence. As a homonculus, a magical construct, she'd already taken up a lease on it when she'd first been created. Oh well. It wasn't like she'd had much to look forward to, or much to go back to ...
... Berserker ...
Revenge for that. Maybe. Maybe she was wrong and did have something, as shallow as the concept was, to look forward to.
Now, though?
Her body felt distant, like during an astral projection, and she only felt her form defined by the Circuits' metaphysical representation.
She remembered the exchange of spells, the hectic mystical slugfest among the shelves and crates of the magical storeroom - that was the only thing the place could have been, all things considered.
She'd ducked through the space between two shelves, come out on the other side, let loose a brief and overcharged burst that corroded the steel supports of it ...
With a bit of help the whole thing collapsed onto a pair of her assailants, before one of them - a dour looking man who was too controlled to be an Apprentice but not really powerful enough to go much past graduating as a Magi - set loose some sort of Force Projection spell in his last moment before being crushed.
She recalled her body being picked up and flung into the next steel and wood contraption. Her personal wards had held before the impact, and buckled moments later, whereupon she slammed back-first into a wooden crate.
For a moment, there had been silence. Then the sound of something _rolling_ came, and her body ached too much for her to turn her head and look. Something solid and smooth bumped into a haphazardly outflung arm, and her Circuits were suddenly resonating ...
Now there was only this darkness.
Was this death?
If so, she thought, then ... it wouldn't be so bad.
And suddenly, her Circuits hummed. There, in the distance, something flickered.
Illya willed herself to move, and did, floating through the inky blackness towards ...
Oh, how cliche. A light in the darkness. How many novices fell for this sort of trap at one time or another ... sadly, she didn't see how she had much of a choice in this situation.
Maybe she _was_ still alive somewhere, on the ground, stunned ... if so, she wasn't about to just stay there and _die_, all comfort aside. Not if she had a choice!
Of course, 'do nothing' was also a choice, but it wasn't one she'd contemplated.
To Illyasviel von Einzbern, life was motion and change. Something she secretly, desperately craved.
The flicker grew steadily, little more than a shade of slightly off-color blackness at first, then a sheen of some sort ...
Finally, the palms of her hands came to rest on a smooth surface. Black, somehow reflective even with the only lighting coming from Illya's own 'body' of glowing green Magic Circuits.
Nothing happened.
Then, the outlines of where she held her 'hands' sparked, flickers of azure appearing around the spot like fairy fire or ghost-lights.
Nothing changed, or so she thought, before she realized the eyes she saw 'reflected' back at her were not her own.
Simply because the last time she'd checked, her astral body was quite definitel _female_, whereas that one ...
What is it you want? What is it you seek?
It was as if the question had echoed within her mind with the strength of a cannon-shot's report, resonating with her Circuits and striking her Self.
The reply that came wasn't one made with words but something far more primal.
Lend me your strength. I shall lend you mine. Until such a time when we may both stand on our own.
***
"Heilige Scheisse," holy shit, Heinrich mumbled.
The storage chamber had been ... well, not totalled. Close, though.
Artifacts lay strewn where they'd fallen after one of the stands had been collapsed, more littered the ground elsewhere - results of spells gone off target - and the air was almost bitter with a mixture of powdered plaster and burnt mana.
And that was without mentioning the bodies. Not as many as in the corridors, but still ...
"Over here!"
Heinrich turned and waded into the now silent chamber, between broken wood, bent steel, the occasional puddle of blood and surviving artifact.
Hiroyuki Takeshi and his two Apprentices were in the process of putting a kekkai around an insensate white haired girl.
Apparently, she'd gone through a metal support, then slammed into a crate with enough force to splinter and nearly break the wood around her impact point, which had knocked her out.
Good.
Good.
He allowed himself a sigh of relief when Takeshi informed him the homonculus had only taken minimal damage, and her Circuits were still intact.
Well, that wasn't exactly pristine, but nobody said it needed to be. His patrons merely required that the thing still functioned after retrieval.
Strange though ...
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be,
For my unconquerable soul.
The sound carried through the air, not coming from any one place but seemingly from all around them, making the present Magi and Apprentices startle.
Heinrich's foot bumped into something, and he looked down.
In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance,
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
A sphere, somwhat smaller than a volleyball, rolled away from where he'd kicked it ... trailing sparks?
"We ... may have a slight problem here," Takeshi called out, his hands a blur and his Apprentices both chanting with increasing speed.
The green radiance of Magic Circuits coming to the fore covered Einzbern's body, the threads of power seemingly reaching outwards to draw ...
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
The cloying sensation of burnt mana was momentarily gone, and Heinrich's eyes went wide as he backed away, slowly, then with increasing speed ...
"Containment!" he shouted, slamming the door shut as he dashed into the corridor. Oh, he did not like where this was going one bit, and to hell with Takeshi - there was no time to tear him away from the spellcasting anyway, since wards were very delicate and had a tendency to do ... weird ... things when not properly laid or completed. "I want this whole section locked down and isolated, _now_!"
He turned, slammed both hands into the door, and activated his own Circuits. Others joined.
There was a brief flash of power coming from the locking spells that were slowly starting to be layered on the wall and door, then ... nothing.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
But the _whisper_ still reached them, even as something in the storage chamber twisted the mana, and Heinrich remembered where he'd felt something remotely similar before.
"A summoning? No, something ..."
Those were the last things he said, as two dark red lengths of metal suddenly went _through_ the hastily layered protections and the reinforced metal of the door ... before going into and through his chest.
There was a moment of chaos as he slid down, and the concrete wall seemed to erupt outwards with a burst of ... amber? ... but as the light dimmed he saw the bedamned homonculus being carried from the wreckage by what could only be a Servant.
One wielding a dark red, two-pronged spear in his free hand.
Invictus.
And then, for Heinrich, there was only darkness.
A rather permanent one.
I felt the urge to write this bit, and it just wouldn't let me go.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm
It was reflex action, really. The first thing she'd heard upon coming back to had been unfamiliar voices, the first thing she'd felt had been restrains, both physical and mystical, that were supposed to keep her bound and immobile.
No normal person would have managed it. No normal Magi either.
Illyasviel von Einzbern was far from normal, though. She'd been _born_ for the sole purpose of fighting in the War. Mystical restrains that would stop or at least hamper Magi severely had less effect on someone whose body was, for all intents and purposes, a collection of Magic Circuits. Some Magi spent their lives seeking power, while she, from a certain point of view, was power incarnate.
It was one of the reasons why she'd not gone insane under the constant mental pressure of having had a bond to ...
... Berserker ...
... she'd almost called out, despite being aware of the futility of said action on a level more intimate than was possible for non-magic users. To a being like her, the lack of Reiju that had been almost integrated into the intricacies of her own Magic Circuits by then, was like the sudden lack of a limb.
The only being she'd _known_ cared for her, even if its way of doing so had been crude, simplistic, and basically centered around the concept of 'you hurt Master. you die!', was gone.
There were many variables that decided how efficiently a Magic Circuit could direct mana, or with how much capacity it could do so. The emotional state of the was one such variable.
The realization of captivity, the trauma of knowing that someone had taken her only 'friend' from her ...
What followed was rather like the result of setting off an explosive charge in an enclosed space.
***
Heinrich Krause was no longer concerned. He'd gone past that a few moments ago, headed past 'worried', and somehow wound up stopping at 'furious'.
True, he'd initially only been ordered to observe, but his patrons in the Association hadn't limited themselves to that, and while their suggestions were not strictly within the limits set by his motherhouse's directives ...
... well, everybody and their dog knew that those were more like guidelines anyway, unless you were actually inept enough to get caught breaking them.
A Magi was only worth as much as his ambition was powerful, or so the old proverb stated.
Traditionally, the War was not to be interfered with.
Tradition, though, only applied when it could be made useful. Heinrich was priviliged enough that his patrons had enlightened him.
Power is power.
And Heinrich had always been quite ambitious.
He'd always been very good at his job, both official and not, else his patrons wouldn't have had him sent to Fuyuki in the first place.
They'd located the Einzbern homonculus early on, they'd bided their time, they'd taken advantage of a situation that, whilst dangerous, had also served them their target on a silver platter.
The Gods had gone ahead and given Heinrich the boon of a short sighted adversary, something he'd always been fond of. The strike team wouldn't have been able to directly overwhelm the Matou brat _and_ his Servant ... or Servants, but they'd not been required to.
All it had taken was a little pressure, posturing, and acting for him to hand over the 'useless, now that she doesn't have Reiju' girl to 'her Einzbern bodyguards'.
Sniveling coward. How people like that were able to become Masters in the first place, Heinrich didn't know and didn't much care.
Now, though ... now things were not looking all that rosy.
They'd brought the homonculus back, retrieved restrains that would hold even Heinrich himself - he'd though this with more than a little pride, since he'd been the one to design them - and were about to secure it in a null-zone cell ...
There was nothing left of the two apprentices who'd been assigned this task, save scraps of meat and bone splattered over the walls of said cell.
And now that subhuman _thing_ was loose in their facility - if she were to get out, things would become distinctly unpleasant for the Magi present. If not directly, then when the reports came in.
Doctoring them was always an option, he knew, but things like that had a nasty habit of coming to light under the Questors of the Association. The Clock Tower in particular.
"Sir! We have it!" one of the apprentices tied into the facility's wards exclaimed, unfocused eyes tracking movement he alone was seeing. "The locking and containment wards of the outer storage chambers have been tripped."
Well, that was a mixed blessing. Hopefully, it could be captured and contained before it caused too much of a mess.
***
... there was only darkness.
She jerked in surprise at the sudden shift in surroundings, finally regaining some semblance of sanity again.
Not that she'd been entirely out of it, but she realized that she hadn't exactly thought in terms other than immediate survival after managing to free herself.
She'd been running on desperation, sorrow, anger ... and had recognized that, the fluctuations in power it brought - so she'd taken the path of most resistance, hoping to bring her captors' strength and numbers down by as much as she could before those aftereffects left her a burned out mess.
How that reasoning had caused her to break the strongest ward she could sense in her vicinity, she couldn't exactly tell, though she'd left a trail of broken Magi and Apprentices in her wake in the process.
It wasn't much of a chamber to look at, the place she'd gone into - shelves, shelves, and nothing but steel supports and shelves. And cardboard. The occasional crate. The _contents_, though, were powerful to her senses. Plain as a star on a cloudless country night.
Then pursuit had caught up, and she was dodging, forcing more power through her Circuits, and flinging it towards the newcomers.
What she'd been made for.
In a flash of hindsight, Illya realized the display had cost her a few years of her already stretched existence. As a homonculus, a magical construct, she'd already taken up a lease on it when she'd first been created. Oh well. It wasn't like she'd had much to look forward to, or much to go back to ...
... Berserker ...
Revenge for that. Maybe. Maybe she was wrong and did have something, as shallow as the concept was, to look forward to.
Now, though?
Her body felt distant, like during an astral projection, and she only felt her form defined by the Circuits' metaphysical representation.
She remembered the exchange of spells, the hectic mystical slugfest among the shelves and crates of the magical storeroom - that was the only thing the place could have been, all things considered.
She'd ducked through the space between two shelves, come out on the other side, let loose a brief and overcharged burst that corroded the steel supports of it ...
With a bit of help the whole thing collapsed onto a pair of her assailants, before one of them - a dour looking man who was too controlled to be an Apprentice but not really powerful enough to go much past graduating as a Magi - set loose some sort of Force Projection spell in his last moment before being crushed.
She recalled her body being picked up and flung into the next steel and wood contraption. Her personal wards had held before the impact, and buckled moments later, whereupon she slammed back-first into a wooden crate.
For a moment, there had been silence. Then the sound of something _rolling_ came, and her body ached too much for her to turn her head and look. Something solid and smooth bumped into a haphazardly outflung arm, and her Circuits were suddenly resonating ...
Now there was only this darkness.
Was this death?
If so, she thought, then ... it wouldn't be so bad.
And suddenly, her Circuits hummed. There, in the distance, something flickered.
Illya willed herself to move, and did, floating through the inky blackness towards ...
Oh, how cliche. A light in the darkness. How many novices fell for this sort of trap at one time or another ... sadly, she didn't see how she had much of a choice in this situation.
Maybe she _was_ still alive somewhere, on the ground, stunned ... if so, she wasn't about to just stay there and _die_, all comfort aside. Not if she had a choice!
Of course, 'do nothing' was also a choice, but it wasn't one she'd contemplated.
To Illyasviel von Einzbern, life was motion and change. Something she secretly, desperately craved.
The flicker grew steadily, little more than a shade of slightly off-color blackness at first, then a sheen of some sort ...
Finally, the palms of her hands came to rest on a smooth surface. Black, somehow reflective even with the only lighting coming from Illya's own 'body' of glowing green Magic Circuits.
Nothing happened.
Then, the outlines of where she held her 'hands' sparked, flickers of azure appearing around the spot like fairy fire or ghost-lights.
Nothing changed, or so she thought, before she realized the eyes she saw 'reflected' back at her were not her own.
Simply because the last time she'd checked, her astral body was quite definitel _female_, whereas that one ...
What is it you want? What is it you seek?
It was as if the question had echoed within her mind with the strength of a cannon-shot's report, resonating with her Circuits and striking her Self.
The reply that came wasn't one made with words but something far more primal.
Lend me your strength. I shall lend you mine. Until such a time when we may both stand on our own.
***
"Heilige Scheisse," holy shit, Heinrich mumbled.
The storage chamber had been ... well, not totalled. Close, though.
Artifacts lay strewn where they'd fallen after one of the stands had been collapsed, more littered the ground elsewhere - results of spells gone off target - and the air was almost bitter with a mixture of powdered plaster and burnt mana.
And that was without mentioning the bodies. Not as many as in the corridors, but still ...
"Over here!"
Heinrich turned and waded into the now silent chamber, between broken wood, bent steel, the occasional puddle of blood and surviving artifact.
Hiroyuki Takeshi and his two Apprentices were in the process of putting a kekkai around an insensate white haired girl.
Apparently, she'd gone through a metal support, then slammed into a crate with enough force to splinter and nearly break the wood around her impact point, which had knocked her out.
Good.
Good.
He allowed himself a sigh of relief when Takeshi informed him the homonculus had only taken minimal damage, and her Circuits were still intact.
Well, that wasn't exactly pristine, but nobody said it needed to be. His patrons merely required that the thing still functioned after retrieval.
Strange though ...
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be,
For my unconquerable soul.
The sound carried through the air, not coming from any one place but seemingly from all around them, making the present Magi and Apprentices startle.
Heinrich's foot bumped into something, and he looked down.
In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance,
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
A sphere, somwhat smaller than a volleyball, rolled away from where he'd kicked it ... trailing sparks?
"We ... may have a slight problem here," Takeshi called out, his hands a blur and his Apprentices both chanting with increasing speed.
The green radiance of Magic Circuits coming to the fore covered Einzbern's body, the threads of power seemingly reaching outwards to draw ...
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
The cloying sensation of burnt mana was momentarily gone, and Heinrich's eyes went wide as he backed away, slowly, then with increasing speed ...
"Containment!" he shouted, slamming the door shut as he dashed into the corridor. Oh, he did not like where this was going one bit, and to hell with Takeshi - there was no time to tear him away from the spellcasting anyway, since wards were very delicate and had a tendency to do ... weird ... things when not properly laid or completed. "I want this whole section locked down and isolated, _now_!"
He turned, slammed both hands into the door, and activated his own Circuits. Others joined.
There was a brief flash of power coming from the locking spells that were slowly starting to be layered on the wall and door, then ... nothing.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
But the _whisper_ still reached them, even as something in the storage chamber twisted the mana, and Heinrich remembered where he'd felt something remotely similar before.
"A summoning? No, something ..."
Those were the last things he said, as two dark red lengths of metal suddenly went _through_ the hastily layered protections and the reinforced metal of the door ... before going into and through his chest.
There was a moment of chaos as he slid down, and the concrete wall seemed to erupt outwards with a burst of ... amber? ... but as the light dimmed he saw the bedamned homonculus being carried from the wreckage by what could only be a Servant.
One wielding a dark red, two-pronged spear in his free hand.
Invictus.
And then, for Heinrich, there was only darkness.
A rather permanent one.
I felt the urge to write this bit, and it just wouldn't let me go.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm