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The world was never short of smart people.
A lot of the chat's read on Vritra had been remarkably sharp — cutting straight through to the structural logic of the situation with the kind of instinctive pattern recognition that came from too many hours playing too many games. Max appreciated it. It was one of the things he genuinely liked about his audience.
He appreciated it slightly less when he shifted his attention from the chat to the people physically standing next to him.
"Okay so I don't understand the lore," Astolfo announced cheerfully, "but basically, there's a really powerful big dragon right there, and we have to fight it, right?!"
Maverick stared.
"Yes," Max said. "That's... yes."
"Max~!" Chen Ge, apparently recovered from his various emotional crises, had entered full fan mode. "After this is all over, can you add me as a friend? I genuinely love Holy Grail War so much. It's such a good game."
"Yeah, speaking of which," Maverick added, in the tone of someone raising a reasonable concern, "where exactly did your custom character model come from? The rest of us have Kenneth. You have something completely different."
These were, objectively, not the most pressing questions available.
[TacticalMoment]: We have a six-hour countdown. Six hours. And they're asking for friend requests.
[CorrectPriorities]: To be fair, I also want his friend code.
[FocusIssue]: The people tasked with saving Fuyuki City are currently starstruck. Great.
Lily, who had been standing quietly at the edge of the group after her landing, made a small sound.
Then she relocated herself behind Maverick.
Maverick, who had been in the process of asking a follow-up question, noticed this and opened his mouth.
Then he heard the sound.
It was the specific sound of barely-contained longing — slow, reverent, the sound of someone seeing something they wanted very badly and exercising tremendous self-control about not immediately reaching for it.
Slurp.
He closed his mouth and stepped very slightly to the side.
Medea was looking at Lily with the expression of a collector who has spotted a once-in-a-lifetime acquisition.
"I'm not a bad person, little one," Medea said, in a voice specifically engineered to sound non-threatening. "You are extraordinarily cute. Would you be willing to let me take your measurements? I can make you literally anything — the fabric I have access to is—"
Lily made the face of a small animal that has correctly identified a predator.
She pressed herself further behind Maverick.
Medea's eyes went soft in a way that was simultaneously affectionate and mildly alarming.
This, the chat noted, was technically Medea's truest form. The battle sorceress reputation, the High-Thaumaturgy, the city-block demolitions — all accurate, all real. But at her core, Medea was a young woman who liked to sew, liked cute things, and had never quite found the right outlet for either until Max had accidentally given her one.
[Diagnosis]: Medea has seen Lily and lost all tactical awareness. She is fully in hobby mode.
[LilyPOV]: Lily's face right now. Lily's face.
[AstolfoIntervenes]: Oh! I want cute clothes too, big sister! Can you make something for me? With the cute—
[Hiss]: "Hiss~"
[AstolfoRetreat]: "...I don't want them anymore. I don't want anything."
[Corner]: Astolfo is now in the corner. Wuai has joined him in solidarity.
The Astolfo situation resolved itself in Medea's hiss and Astolfo's immediate retreat to a nearby piece of rubble, where he sat with the subdued energy of someone processing multiple disappointments in sequence.
Medea's gaze returned to Lily.
It did not leave Lily.
But important matters came first.
The temperature had already climbed. Not catastrophically yet — just a degree or two above where it had been twenty minutes ago, the kind of shift you'd normally attribute to weather if not for the mountain-sized dragon in the harbor and the second sun burning overhead.
Six hours. Minus the time already elapsed.
Max laid it out.
"Vritra isn't divine — she's classified as a dragon species, which means she can be harmed by conventional Noble Phantasms. The size is intimidating but it's not a defense, it's just size. The actual problem is magical supply." He looked around the group. "A dragon that scale maintaining environmental effects of that magnitude needs a massive, continuous magical source. Her Master has to be running El-Melloi's Magic Furnace — it's the only thing that could sustain this output. That's our real target. Destroy the furnace, cut the Master, and she shuts down."
"So two teams," Chen Ge said immediately. He'd snapped back into tactical mode at some point during the explanation. "Front and back. One group keeps her occupied, the other goes for the Master."
"Exactly. Her Master is almost certainly using Kenneth — same as everyone else — and they'll be positioned somewhere with line-of-sight to Vritra for command purposes. Probably elevated. I can find them."
"What about us?" Maverick asked.
"You two rest." Max held up a hand before the protests could form. "An hour. Restock, patch up, recover. In sixty minutes we move — Medea and I run interference from the front, you and Chen Ge go for the decapitation strike."
Maverick and Chen Ge exchanged a look.
"...Yeah, okay," Maverick said.
"Alright!" Chen Ge's enthusiasm returned at full force. "Max, this is going to be so cool—"
[JealousViewer]: He just casually started calling him by name. Chen Ge is something else.
[EnemyPosition]: Okay but who's watching Max and Medea hold off a mountain-sized dragon? That's the most insane part of this plan.
[MedeaDefense]: Medea has A+ Magic. She can output continuously. The problem is mobility and taking hits.
[RealistView]: She gets hit by that tail once and it's over. This plan has a hole in it.
[MaxKnows]: Max knows this. He's not saying it out loud.
It was a simple plan. Clean. Unpretentious.
The kind of plan that worked if execution was perfect and fell apart if it wasn't.
Max pulled out his phone.
He'd been avoiding this call, partly because of the timing and partly because of what it meant to make it, but the arithmetic of the situation was unavoidable. Vritra needed to be engaged from range by something with enough consistent output to hold her attention, and Medea was strong but she wasn't invincible, and there was a resource available that he hadn't wanted to use yet because deploying it this early changed things.
He dialed.
The connection went through after two rings.
"Hey. About the delivery — I know it was flagged. I'm not asking about the weapons." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "I need the plane. Just the plane. Tell them the weapons can sit in customs as long as they want, I don't care, but the aircraft needs to—"
He listened.
His expression, which had been carefully neutral, went through several things in rapid succession.
"What do you mean it's also stuck at customs."
[Choked]: I'm sorry.
[Dying]: HIS OWN GAME'S CUSTOMS SYSTEM IS BLOCKING HIM—
[Poetic]: The developer, defeated by his own settings. This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
[CustomsHero]: CUSTOMS DID THE RIGHT THING. CUSTOMS IS THE REAL MVP.
[PracticalProblem]: Okay but now how do they get up to a flying dragon without an aircraft??
[Astolfo_Solution]: Astolfo has a hippogriff.
[Silence]: ...
[MoreSilence]: ...
[Wuai_Hears_This]:Wuai.(No. No, absolutely not. I did not agree to—)
Max hung up. Looked at the harbor. Looked at Wuai.
Wuai looked back at him with the expression of a creature that could see exactly where this was going.
"Astolfo," Max said.
"Yes~?"
"How do you feel about a temporary alliance?"
Astolfo's face lit up like a sunrise. The second one, specifically, which was still burning overhead above Fuyuki and the mountain in the harbor and the group of streamers and Servants currently clustered in the ruins of a commercial street trying to figure out how to kill a god's rival with sixty minutes to prepare.
"I thought you'd never ask!"
[WuaiFinal]:Wuai.(I am going to need compensation for this. Significant compensation.)
Something moved in the harbor.
A massive head, scaled and ancient, turning slowly toward the city.
The temperature climbed another half-degree.
The clock was running.
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