Lancelot was hammering away with Arondight in one hand and the hapless wyvern in the other, smashing both down against [Mash]'s shield like he had a personal grudge against the planet.
Arondight held up fine, but every time the wyvern club connected, chunks of the poor dragon went flying—fangs, reverse scales, the works.
"Gyaaahhh!!"
The sheer savage force behind those blows was something else.
The regular Mash was visibly straining under the pressure, but [Mash]? She blocked every strike with effortless grace, like she had all the time in the world.
"Arthur~~!"
Even while he was pounding the shields, Lancelot's real target never changed: the "Artoria" standing right behind them. He was only hammering the two Mash Kyrielights to carve a path straight to Jeanne.
[Mash] had already clocked his obsession. She shot her so-called "father" a look of pure, seething disgust.
She might have grown from a Demi-Servant into a full Servant with Adam's help, but her power was still bound to Galahad at the core. After everything they'd been through in the Singularities, she still carried that lingering sense of identity as his vessel.
Which made this whole mess feel like a personal humiliation.
Watching this brainless Berserker scream "Arthur! Arthur!!" while she remembered every disgraceful stunt he'd pulled in life made her blood boil.
Once she had Lancelot completely locked down with her shield, [Mash] turned her head and asked Adam in a flat, ice-cold voice:
"Senpai, can I just erase this walking embarrassment right now? He's dragging the entire Round Table's honor through the dirt."
Adam glanced at Lancelot, stroking his chin as he thought it over.
None of the three teammates they were hunting next had any ties to this guy. No reason to let him walk. They could end the Knight of the Lake's story right here.
But if they wanted to squeeze every last drop of emotional value out of this, [Mash] still needed one tiny extra push.
So he shook his head lightly, shooting down her purely tactical request.
"Not yet, [Mash]. As for him…"
"I've got my own plans. You already know what his obsession is in this state, right?"
"I think it's worth helping him scratch that itch at least once."
"Though you can… gently correct his perception while you're at it."
As he spoke, Adam's mind flicked through every Artoria in his roster, weighing which one would hit the hardest.
[Mash] didn't get mad at the rejection. She zeroed in on those last few words.
…She could correct his perception…
The second the idea hit, every ridiculous, cringeworthy stunt Lancelot had pulled back at Adam's Chaldea flashed through her head.
Her lips curled into a savage grin before she even realized it.
Ritsuka had never seen that look on [Mash]'s face before—pure, unfiltered murderous intent. She jumped and instinctively grabbed Adam's arm.
"Uwaah! Adam, what the hell?"
"Your [Mash] just made the scariest face I've ever seen. It's like she's staring at her own embarrassing dad or something."
Adam gave her a meaningful glance, but her tone was pure innocent curiosity. He let it slide.
"Hmm… how do I even explain this?"
"It's complicated. This new Berserker does have a certain connection to Mash."
"As for exactly what? Can't tell you yet."
Revealing the full truth right now would drag Galahad into it, and Mash's mentality still wasn't ready for that kind of power spike. They'd already talked it over with [Mash] and decided to keep her real identity under wraps for now.
But Ritsuka's eyes lit up like fireworks the second she smelled a secret.
"Eh?! That pitch-black Berserker is connected to Mash? Come on, don't leave me hanging~"
"Just whisper it. I swear I won't tell a soul."
Even with the full spoiled-girl act, Adam shut it down hard. This was about Mash's growth.
"No. You'll find out when it's time."
Ritsuka's face crumpled instantly.
"Uuu… I hate riddle-speakers." Her voice went completely flat.
Seeing her so deflated, Adam pressed his lips together in mild helplessness.
"…Why don't you just ask your own Mash how she feels about Lancelot right now?"
Ritsuka turned toward the regular Mash, who was still trying to keep pace with [Mash] in the fight.
[Mash] had already shoved Lancelot back more than ten meters, and the regular Mash was falling behind. She was about to charge in again when she heard Ritsuka yelling from behind.
"Mash! How do you feel when you look at that black Berserker right now~?"
Mash glanced back at Ritsuka, then toward her Master's side.
[Mash] had Lancelot completely suppressed. He didn't look like any threat to her teacher at all.
So she decided to answer first before heading back to help.
She thought about the question—what did that black Berserker actually make her feel?
The answer hit like a slap.
Her brows knotted instantly. The feeling was definitely not pleasant.
"Um… how should I put this, Senpai? I feel this weird, inexplicable rage bubbling up inside me…"
"Rage?" Ritsuka blinked.
Mash nodded and unconsciously glanced at the shield in her hands.
"Yeah. Senpai, I just want to smack him flying with my shield—not the flat side, but the edge that hurts the absolute most!"
"..."
Ritsuka scratched her head, totally lost. She had no clue where [Mash]'s sudden violent fury toward the black-armored knight was coming from.
It couldn't really be because she was looking at her own embarrassing father… could it?
Full of questions, she shifted her gaze back to the pitch-black Berserker.
At the same time, Mash finished answering and turned to look at Lancelot too.
The second they saw his current state, both of them froze.
Right now,
[Mash] was delivering the most "filial" beatdown imaginable.
Earlier, when their weapons clashed, she had spun her shield and used the longest edge of her cross-shaped barrier to trip him clean off his feet. The instant he tried to recover mid-fall, she gave him zero mercy.
She swung her shield and slammed him straight into the ground before he could even touch down!
Then she kept pounding him relentlessly, teeth gritted, voice dripping venom:
"You parasite on the Round Table! Can't you keep that thing in your pants for five damn minutes?!"
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"You stole my clothes!!!"
"Stealing them is bad enough, but striking those disgusting poses in them?!"
"And saying those revolting lines?!"
"What the hell is wrong with you?!"
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"Those were the clothes I was planning to wear for Senpai!"
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"How am I supposed to wear them for Senpai after you've ruined them like that?!"
"Do you have any idea how hard it is to scrub that image out of my head?!"
Bang——!
With her final, most savage strike, [Mash] cratered the earth. Lancelot was buried deep inside it. Only one hand stuck out of the dirt, twitching weakly to prove he was still technically alive.
After venting every last bit of frustration, [Mash] let out a long, satisfied breath and instantly looked ten times lighter.
"Te—Teacher?"
Mash stared at her teacher in pure shock, never expecting her to have this kind of side.
But her very first thought wasn't about the connection between the black Berserker and herself. Instead, she immediately worried about her teacher's mental state.
"Are… are you okay?"
"You looked really angry just now."
[Mash] had already calmed down. She gave Mash her usual gentle smile.
"Don't worry, I'm fine. I just saw a bug and couldn't resist stepping on it."
"..."
It wasn't just Mash who was stunned.
Marie, Mozart, Siegfried, and Ritsuka were all staring at [Mash] in dead silence before slowly turning their eyes to the pitiful, half-buried Lancelot.
Every time that shield had slammed down, the impacts had made Ritsuka's shoulders flinch.
She still couldn't wrap her head around why [Mash] was so furious.
Her curiosity won out. She turned back to Adam.
"Adam, you don't have to tell me the whole story, but can you at least tell me who this black Berserker actually is?
"I want to know the name of the guy who just got absolutely demolished by [Mash]."
Adam looked at her and weighed his options. Given Ritsuka's history grades were basically in the negatives, even telling her Lancelot's True Name and full backstory probably wouldn't click.
"That black Berserker's True Name is Lancelot."
"Oh, it's Lancelot~ Mm, Lancelot…"
The second she heard the name, Ritsuka put on an "Ah, of course, I totally get it now" face.
Could it be that Ritsuka actually knew about Lancelot despite her terrible grades?
Just as Adam started wondering, he caught the pure, untainted confusion in her eyes.
He called her out immediately.
"Ritsuka, you have no idea who Lancelot is, do you?"
She scratched her head awkwardly.
"Ahaha, busted."
"I really don't know who Lancelot is."
"Um… so who is he exactly?"
Adam quickly ran through Lancelot's life story in his head, searching for the simplest way to explain it to someone with negative history points.
Then he remembered Artoria Alter—the one Ritsuka had already met back in Fuyuki.
Perfect entry point.
"Ritsuka, do you remember what I told you about King Arthur during the Fuyuki Singularity?"
She thought for a second, then nodded as the memory clicked.
"Ah, yeah, I remember~"
"Does Lancelot have something to do with King Arthur?"
Adam gave a small nod and started from there.
"That's right. King Arthur commanded the twelve Knights of the Round Table.
"Lancelot was one of them—and he was the chief knight, the strongest of the entire Round Table."
Ritsuka's eyes widened when she heard he was the chief knight.
"That strong?"
Then she looked at Lancelot, still half-buried in the dirt.
…Strong or not, [Mash] still looked way stronger.
"But if he's the top knight of the Round Table, why does he look like… this?"
She pointed at the pitch-black armor. It didn't exactly scream glorious and majestic.
"That's a long story about his life experiences."
"Mm… it's pretty… abstract. Extremely abstract, actually."
Ritsuka raised an eyebrow at the word.
"Abstract?"
"How abstract can it be? More abstract than King Arthur actually being a woman?"
Adam's expression turned complicated as he pressed his lips together.
"…It actually has a lot to do with that very fact."
"Eh?" Ritsuka blinked.
Adam's mind drifted back to the heartfelt conversation he once shared with Artoria about their feelings.
"You just said it yourself, Ritsuka—King Arthur's true gender is female."
Ritsuka Fujimaru instantly recalled the cold, black-armored King Arthur from her own Chaldea the moment Adam spoke.
"Yeah, what about her?"
"But… even though Lia is a woman, she still took Guinevere as her queen."
"..."
The sheer weight of that information left Ritsuka stunned for several long seconds as her brain tried to process it.
Then her eyes suddenly widened and her voice shot up in shock.
"…Wait, what?! King Arthur is a lesbian?!"
Once the realization fully hit—that the female King Arthur had married another woman—her expression turned utterly ridiculous.
So this kind of thing had already been popular that far back in history?
"What are you even imagining?"
Adam gave her a dead-fish-eyed stare at how wildly off-track her thoughts had gone, then straightened up and explained properly.
"How should I put this… At the time, Lia followed the advice of a certain fluffy mage and chose to disguise herself as a man. She presented herself to the public with both the appearance and bearing of a male king."
Fou had been curled up asleep on Adam's shoulder. Neither Lancelot's roaring nor the thunderous impacts of [Mash] slamming him into the ground had woken the little creature.
"…Fou~!"
But the second Merlin was mentioned, Fou's eyes snapped open. She looked around warily, fur bristling.
Adam gently pulled the startled Fou into his arms, stroking her to calm her down while he continued.
"Only a very small handful of people knew Lia's true gender, so to everyone else, she was male."
"It was unavoidable. The people had begun worrying about the king's marriage, and the daughter of a certain king heard about King Arthur and became utterly devoted to him."
"That daughter was Guinevere. For political reasons, Lia had no choice but to accept the female Guinevere as her queen under heavy pressure."
Ritsuka's expression grew more and more complicated as she listened, her head starting to spin.
"Yeah… it really is pretty abstract."
"Then what happened with Guinevere?"
"From her point of view, she believed she was marrying a man, right?"
"So at night… you know, during those times… wouldn't she notice something was off?"
A goofy look crossed Ritsuka's face for a split second.
"Don't tell me they used magecraft to hypnotize her or something? Knock her out every night and let her experience everything in her dreams that couldn't happen in reality?"
Adam looked at her with a mix of exasperation and amusement, shaking his head to shut down the wild guess.
"No, Lia didn't go that route."
"Even though she could have easily used magecraft to hypnotize Guinevere and keep the secret forever—maybe even for the rest of her life—she chose not to. Lia felt incredibly guilty toward Guinevere. She believed she had wasted the girl's entire life."
"So on their very first wedding night, Lia confessed her true identity to Guinevere."
Ritsuka was genuinely surprised that King Arthur hadn't kept it hidden and instead came clean about being a woman.
After hiding her gender for so long, what if Guinevere panicked and spilled the secret? What would King Arthur have done then?
"So… what was Guinevere's reaction?"
"Guinevere admired King Arthur deeply, but as I said, that admiration was built on the assumption that the king was male."
"When she married him, she thought she was marrying a man, so her feelings were basically the joy of a successful fangirl moment."
"But once she learned Lia was actually a woman, you can imagine the emotional whiplash."
Ritsuka glanced sideways at Adam, her mind involuntarily putting herself in Guinevere's shoes.
If on her own wedding night with Adam, he suddenly revealed he was actually a woman…
…Well, there was nothing for it. Chaotic Evil Ritsuka would just have to tearfully retreat into her imaginary space.
"Even though Guinevere was devastated at first, she ultimately chose to understand Lia's situation and worked together with her to keep the secret of her true gender."
Ritsuka felt a surge of admiration for Guinevere after hearing she'd forgiven everything.
"When you put it like that, Guinevere really was an amazing queen. She even actively helped cover for King Arthur."
As she spoke, Ritsuka glanced again at the half-buried Lancelot and scratched her head in confusion at something Adam had said earlier.
"Um, but Adam, you've told me all this… what does any of this have to do with Lancelot?"
Adam took a deep breath and moved to the key turning point.
"This is where it connects."
"Ritsuka, imagine Guinevere left alone in the palace."
"Because Lia was constantly away on campaigns. Even when she returned, she was overwhelmed with state affairs. Sometimes they barely saw each other for an entire month."
"It was during one of those lonely periods that Guinevere happened to meet Lancelot—who also deeply revered King Arthur. The two of them bonded over their shared admiration for the King."
"Oh! This setup! This familiar plot! Don't tell me—?!"
The classic development immediately reminded Ritsuka of certain… very specific doujinshi categories she had read before. The similarity was suspiciously high.
"I won't go into the exact details of what happened between them. I'll just tell you the consequences this event caused."
"In the tenth year of King Arthur's reign, the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere was exposed."
"Artoria herself didn't react too strongly to the incident. Deep down, she felt guilty toward Guinevere."
"However, the fallout was no longer something a single person could control—even if that person was the King."
"The event became the spark that led to the deaths of Agravain, Gaheris, and Gareth."
"Gareth was Gawain's younger sister. Her death caused Gawain to completely despise Lancelot."
"Gawain fought Lancelot and was injured. Afterward, Lancelot left Britain and returned to his territories in Europe."
"The Round Table suffered a devastating blow, and things only deteriorated further."
"Mordred's rebellion… sigh."
"And then the Battle of Camlann, and the death of King Arthur."
"During the Battle of Camlann, Lancelot offered his aid, but Gawain refused him."
"After that, Lancelot spent the rest of his life drowning in regret."
Ritsuka's brows furrowed deeply after hearing the full story. Her face twisted in disbelief.
"Ugh, it really is that dramatic… how soap opera."
(There were even more dramatic parts, but Adam chose not to overload her with everything.)
Ritsuka looked at Lancelot's pitch-black armored form.
"So… the reason he looks like this is because of…"
"Yes. Lancelot believes the fall of Camelot was entirely his fault. That guilt alone was already overwhelming…"
"On top of that, after he returned to Europe, Lia never punished him for what he had done."
"That's why Lancelot has such strong compatibility as a Berserker—because the rest of his life was consumed by nothing but regret, regret, and more regret. That obsession turned him into what you see today."
"Deep in his heart, Lancelot yearns to receive the punishment he believes he deserves from the King of Knights."
Ritsuka's expression cleared with understanding. She finally had a better grasp of the character.
"So that's it. He's tormented because he never received the punishment he thought he deserved?"
She repeated the words to herself, but the more she thought about them, the stranger they sounded. She muttered quietly under her breath:
"…Longing to be punished by the King of Knights… why does that sound kind of masochistic?"
Even though she spoke very softly, Adam still heard it.
Adam: "..."
He remained silent for a moment and wisely decided to pretend he hadn't heard anything.
"Hm?"
Suddenly, Ritsuka remembered something. When Lancelot first burst into the camp, his primary target had been Jeanne.
But wasn't his obsession supposed to be with King Arthur?
Why had he attacked Jeanne?
She turned and stared intently at Jeanne's face.
The more she looked, the more familiar it became. Finally, realization dawned on her. She clapped her left fist against her right palm.
"Ah! I get it now! That's why Lancelot kept charging at Jeanne!"
"It's because Jeanne's face looks exactly like King Arthur's!"
"But why do they have identical faces? Are they related by blood or something?"
(Yeah, why indeed? Got any ideas, Takeuchi Takashi?)
"..."
After a brief silence, Adam chose not to voice his inner thoughts and smoothly shifted the topic.
"Actually, Ritsuka…"
"The resemblance between Lia's face and Jeanne's goes quite a bit further than you might think."
Ritsuka clearly didn't understand what he meant.
"What do you mean 'quite a bit further'?"
It was already bizarre enough that King Arthur and Jeanne d'Arc had the exact same face. That could be written off as an extremely rare historical coincidence.
But was he implying there were even more people who looked identical to them?
Adam didn't answer directly. He silently glanced at the dozens of Artoria-faced Servants in his roster and chose to stay quiet.
Artoria herself accounted for the vast majority of those identical faces.
Adam looked at the collection of Artorias in his Servant list—enough to wage an entire Holy Grail War by themselves—then glanced back at Lancelot.
Lancelot, who had been knocked unconscious by [Mash]'s brutal barrage, was finally starting to stir.
He thrashed violently within the crater. With his A-rank Strength, it didn't take long for him to break free from the earth.
Still not fully lucid, he staggered to his feet, shook his head hard, and let out another one of his strange, guttural roars toward the sky.
"Arthur~!"
His obsession truly ran deep.
Since you're this fixated… I'll help you fulfill it.
Adam decided he would grant Berserker Lancelot his greatest wish upon manifestation—to see Artoria at least once.
However…
Since he was going out of his way to let Lancelot meet Artoria and satisfy his obsession,
It was only fair that Lancelot give something back in return. Emotional value in exchange for emotional fulfillment—a fair trade.
If seeing one Artoria generated emotional value, then seeing multiple Artorias should generate far more, right?
If Lancelot wanted to see Artoria so badly…
Adam decided he would over-fulfill the Berserker's wish. Surely Lancelot would be extremely grateful.
With that thought in mind, Adam prepared to go all out. He checked his resource counter.
Resource Points — 35/58
He used the system to unsummon all his Servants except [Mash].
At the same time, under the bewildered gazes of everyone present, Swimsuit Jeanne d'Arc Alter, Black Marie, and Salieri suddenly vanished, providing Adam with a fresh surge of emotional value.
Resource Points — 0/58
Adam opened his Servant inventory and began selecting his Artorias.
***
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