"In summary: Rider escaped with his Master. Swims faster than he runs, apparently. As for Berserker — he fell into the ocean when Rider dismissed his Noble Phantasm. Current status unknown, but based on the disturbance patterns on the water's surface..."
The Hassan fragment paused. This one wore a mohawk — one of the more distinctive-looking personas, with a wiry build and a way of delivering reports that was almost clinical in its precision.
"...he appears to be running along the seabed."
"Running," Maverick repeated.
"Along the bottom of the ocean. Yes."
Maverick's lips twitched. Then twitched again.
Running along the ocean floor. Like gravity and water pressure were suggestions rather than laws. Like the concept of "drowning" simply didn't apply to whatever unholy thing the Berserker class had produced this time.
Based on what the fragments had described — the height, the build, the skin tone, the raw physical power capable of snapping a warship's keel with a single blow — Maverick had a pretty strong suspicion about the Berserker's identity. The profile matched one particular Heroic Spirit almost perfectly.
But suspicion wasn't confirmation. He'd made that rule for himself on day one: never commit to an identification based on assumptions alone. Physical descriptions could be misleading. Legends could manifest differently than expected. And the cost of being wrong — of building a strategy around fighting the wrong Servant — was death.
So he filed the suspicion away. Flagged it as high-probability. And moved on.
But if he was right...
Then the Berserker's threat level just jumped to number one on the board.
Because the Heroic Spirit Maverick was thinking of wasn't just strong. He was mythologically strong. The kind of strong that came with divine lineage, legendary feats, and the sort of Noble Phantasm that didn't just win fights — it rewrote the rules of engagement entirely.
The Holy Grail War technically didn't allow actual gods to take the field. That was supposed to be the rule.
But Maverick had consumed enough Fate content to know exactly how much that rule was worth.
Nothing. It was worth absolutely nothing. If a Holy Grail War didn't involve at least one Servant bending or breaking the rules, it wouldn't be a Holy Grail War at all. That was practically tradition.
He'd expected the biggest threat this time to be Caster. The unknown variable. The one building something in the shadows while everyone else was busy fighting.
Instead, the biggest threat might be an unkillable giant currently jogging across the harbor floor like it was a morning run.
Fantastic.
But there was a silver lining. Everyone in this war was operating on limited mana — those bottom-tier mage circuits the system had implanted couldn't sustain a Servant at full power for long. No matter how terrifying the Berserker was, his Master was still an ordinary person with the same pathetic mana pool as everyone else.
Even monsters had leashes.
The Caster situation, though — that was different. That was urgent.
Maverick shelved the Berserker problem for now and refocused.
"What about Archer's side?" he asked, turning to a different Hassan fragment — this one older, balding, with the quiet demeanor of someone who'd spent decades practicing the art of not being noticed. "They survived the bombardment?"
"According to your standing orders, we maintained maximum surveillance distance. Didn't risk closing in. After the Rider's barrage ended, they disappeared."
"Disappeared?"
"Completely. The Emperor is extremely perceptive — sharper than any Servant we've observed so far. He likely detected our surveillance, even at distance. It's possible the entire bombardment was factored into his calculations. In any case, both Archer and his Master have gone dark."
Maverick exhaled slowly through his nose. Napoleon. Had to be. The tactical awareness, the ability to read a battlefield from two miles away, the instinct to detect invisible surveillance — all of it pointed to a mind that had spent a lifetime commanding armies and reading the intentions of enemies.
Losing track of him was bad. Having him know he was being tracked was worse.
"Tell everyone to increase their caution. The primary directive hasn't changed: we must not be exposed. Under any circumstances. As long as our network stays hidden, we still have room to maneuver. The moment someone confirms that the Assassin is still active—"
"—the entire strategy collapses. Understood."
"Good." Maverick turned to the next fragment. "Lancer?"
"Lancer's faction has withdrawn for the night. They recovered the body of Saber's Master before leaving the dock district." A pause. "Do you want us to... retrieve anything? The body still has two unused Command Spells on the—"
"No." The word came out harder than Maverick intended. He caught himself. Softened his voice. "No. Don't touch the body. Don't go near it. Don't do anything that could draw attention. We wait."
"Understood."
The Hassan fragments dissolved back into the shadows, one by one, until the church basement was empty except for Maverick and the lingering smell of old books and bad coffee.
He sat in the silence.
And his hands started shaking.
It hit him all at once.
Not the fear of dying — he'd made peace with that on the first night, standing in the frozen park in flip-flops. No, this was something else. Something heavier. Something that settled into his chest like a stone and made every breath feel like it was being filtered through wet concrete.
Someone died because of me.
Vivian. That was her name — well, it was the name the system used. He didn't really know her. Hadn't heard her voice, hadn't seen her face up close, hadn't exchanged a single word with her. But somewhere in the city, a woman was dead on the floor of a shipping warehouse with poison in her blood and knife wounds in her limbs because he had given the order.
His Servant had held the blades. But the decision had been his.
The trembling spread from his hands to his arms. Then to his shoulders. His whole body was vibrating with a frequency that had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the weight of what he'd done.
Did I have the right to do that?
The question surfaced from somewhere deep and dark, and the moment it reached his conscious mind, it multiplied. Fractured. Split into a dozen variations that all pointed to the same unbearable truth.
She was an ordinary person. Just like me. Someone who got dragged into this against her will, who was scared, who was just trying to survive—
And I killed her.
Not in self-defense. Not in the heat of battle. I sat in a church basement drinking coffee while my Servant stabbed her with poisoned knives and watched her bleed out on a concrete floor.
What kind of person does that?
What kind of person am I becoming?
The trembling intensified. His vision blurred. For a moment — just a moment — Maverick felt the ground tilt beneath him, felt the walls of the basement close in, felt the weight of a human life pressing down on his chest until he couldn't—
SMACK.
His right hand seized his left. Crushed it. Squeezed until the bones ground together and pain lanced up his arm, sharp enough to cut through the spiral.
The shaking stopped.
Not gradually. Not gently. It just stopped, like a switch had been thrown, and in the sudden stillness Maverick could hear his own breathing — ragged, uneven, the breathing of a man who'd just pulled himself back from the edge of something he couldn't afford to fall into.
He stared at his clenched fists.
No.
The answer didn't matter. The question didn't matter. Whether he had the "right" to take a life — whether some cosmic moral authority had weighed his soul and found it wanting — none of it mattered.
Because he'd already crossed that line.
It had been crossed the moment he walked into this church on the first night and killed the priest inside. A good man. A man the town loved. A man who'd opened his door to a stranger in the dark and been rewarded with a blade.
There was no going back from that. No redemption arc. No justification that would make it clean.
Maverick wanted to live.
That was it. That was the whole reason. Not justice, not righteousness, not some grand philosophy about the greater good. Just the raw, selfish, animal desire to keep breathing. To see another sunrise. To walk out of this nightmare and go back to a life that, for all its mediocrity, was his.
And if that meant killing? If it meant poisoning and deceiving and manipulating and wearing a dead man's robes while smiling at people he was planning to destroy?
Then he'd do it.
Without hesitation. Without mercy. Without looking back.
Even if the person standing in front of him was a saint who'd saved the world — he would cut them down. Because saints didn't survive Holy Grail Wars. Survivors did.
This was the last time he'd doubt himself.
The last time.
When he spoke again, his voice was steel.
"Set the Berserker situation aside for now. Maintain the current surveillance posture — keep tracking all factions, prioritize location intelligence. Nobody moves without us knowing about it."
The Hassan fragments had reassembled. They stood in a loose semicircle around him, masks tilted attentively, and Maverick could feel the shift in them — the way his conviction rippled outward like a stone dropped into still water. When the Master wavered, the Servants wavered. When the Master hardened, the Servants sharpened.
"The top priority is Caster."
He let that statement hang in the air for a moment.
"Seven civilians missing in the northern district. No signs of struggle. That's not random — that's harvesting. Caster is building something up there. A workshop. A ritual ground. Something that requires human fuel."
His jaw tightened.
"And when a Caster goes quiet — when they stop making noise and hunker down in their territory — that's when they're most dangerous. That's the calm before the storm. You give a Caster time to build, and what they build will eat the rest of us alive."
He leaned forward.
"Every class in this war has a role. Sabers are the most balanced — highest overall stats, the textbook 'strongest class.' Lancers are the fastest, with magic resistance high enough to shrug off most spells. Archers are the nightmare class — not because of range, but because of Independent Action. An Archer can survive for days without a Master, which means they're the hardest to put down by killing the Master alone."
Maverick ticked them off on his fingers as he spoke, laying out the framework not for the Hassan fragments — who already knew this — but for himself. Organizing his thoughts. Sharpening his strategy.
"Riders carry the most Noble Phantasms. Unpredictable. You think you've figured out their arsenal, and they pull something new out of nowhere. Assassins—" A thin, humorless smile. "—are fragile in a straight fight, but lethal to unprotected Masters. And Berserkers trade sanity for raw stat boosts across the board."
He paused.
"But Caster is different. Caster doesn't fight the same war as everyone else. Their combat ability might be the worst of all seven classes — worse than Assassin, even. But that's not the point. Caster is a scaling class. Given time — given a workshop, given resources, given the chance to develop their Territory Creation — a Caster doesn't just compete with the other six classes."
His eyes hardened.
"A Caster devours them."
Silence.
"So we find the workshop. We confirm the identity. And then we make sure that Caster never gets the chance to finish what they're building."
He stood up. The fatigue was still there — in his bones, behind his eyes, in the dull ache of muscles that hadn't properly rested since the war began. But it was underneath now. Buried beneath something harder.
"The Holy Grail stays in this war until I decide what to do with it. The winner of this game is going to be us."
"Understood!" Every fragment spoke in unison. A chorus of masked voices, sharp and certain, echoing through the church basement like a battle cry.
The conviction was contagious.
When the Master burned, the Servants burned with him.
Maverick picked up his cold coffee, took a long sip, and grimaced.
Still terrible.
He drank it anyway.