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Shirou fought the urge to clap his hands over his ears. It wouldn’t have blocked out the six-voiced howl that the Beast sent up as it shrieked out the agony of having a head and neck forcibly removed by a suicidally overcharged noble phantasm - he could feel the notes resonating up through his bones.
Instead, he let the jeweled dagger at his waist take the load as his body’s circuits strained, tried to focus through the noise, to visualize the blade, long and wasp-waisted, with letters in no human tongue marching up the fuller, dark against the metal’s purple sheen...
“Watch out!” Sakura shouted, and then what felt like a flash flood knocked him flying. He tucked and rolled and came back up and saw that the Beast was free again, golden blood smoking and burning the grass and earth under its claws to sick black mud. Sakura’s rush of violet-veined power had thrown him out of the way of its first charge, but the Beast tore at the ground and bellowed after him, its nearest head snaking eyelessly, jagged jaws gaping wider than his own height as though to swallow the one that had wounded it whole.
Shirou dived forward, under the head’s motion, and seized Arondight in both hands, swinging the heavy sword with all his strength to bite deeply into the neck passing beside him even as he spun away from the spray of molten poison that served the Beast for blood and the thrashing of its amputated stump.
Across the clearing, he saw one of the Beast’s heads dive into a flowing dome of violet-veined shadow, black fluid crawling and clinging as it spread up the monster’s neck and golden boils began to erupt from below the liquid surface - boils that were, in turn, filled in by thin but rapidly thickening threads of darker purple as corruption and consumption struggled against each other.
Another reared high above the battle, poised to come down like a hammer, but was pierced through by a flashing streak of mulicolored light - a streak that was followed a moment later by another, and another, and a hundred more, riddling the black menace of it like a machine gun chewing apart a demonstration target. When the stump finally fell to earth, bleeding gold, Rin raised one index finger to her lips and blew across it.
The fourth of the remaining heads struck at Ilya, standing rooted in one place and lit by the azure glow of gathering power. A few feet away, its strike was pre-empted by her release of the energy she’d summoned, a thundering torrent of mystic might that momentarily turned night into day and rose into the distant sky like a beacon without the slightest concern for any mere piece of legendary monster that might have happened to be in the way. The blast was so intense that it didn’t merely remove the Beast’s offending cranium, but also cauterized the wound so deeply that not a single drop of gold leaked out of the charred ash.
Ilya smirked at Rin, and started to say something, some taunt, but Shirou wasn’t able to hear what it was because that was the point at which the Beast’s tail caught him and knocked him into the air for one of the heads to snap out of the air-
Ilyasviel screamed and threw a blast of azure fire that, less prepared than her previous strike, merely splashed off of the Beast’s scales-
Rin fired, once, missed, again, barely nicked the neck of the head coming towards him, ran out of time-
A great wet rope of liquid purple blackness unfurled and stretched towards him, racing to pull him out of the way of those jaws, and losing-
Arondight Broke in his hands, and he cast the twisted blade like a javelin.
The gleaming point found the inner right of that head’s four gleaming eyes, and punched through it, into the skull - terrible brilliance lit the other three, and the gaping mouth, from within, as the releasing energies of the Phantasm’s destruction burned away everything they could reach, delayed only slightly by immortal bone and scale - and then out the back in an explosion of gold and lavender.
A moment later, the gentle grasp of Sakura’s magic had snatched him out of the air and into her arms. “Don’t scare me like that!” she scolded, and a moment later his already aching ribs protested still harder as Ilya piled on from the other side.
“This really isn’t the-” time, he started to say, and cut off with an involuntary shout as the last head of the Beast struck down to devour the three of them and Rin as well in a single bite.
There was no time for him to form Rho Ais again, Ilya had her back to it, Sakura’s black oil was rising but too slowly-
Rin stepped in front of them and, smirking, tossed something tiny and glittering into the monster’s maw.
He had just enough time to see the magical explosion begin to blow the last head apart before the splattering tide of gold and black poured all over the four of them.
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
Shirou fought the urge to clap his hands over his ears. It wouldn’t have blocked out the six-voiced howl that the Beast sent up as it shrieked out the agony of having a head and neck forcibly removed by a suicidally overcharged noble phantasm - he could feel the notes resonating up through his bones.
Instead, he let the jeweled dagger at his waist take the load as his body’s circuits strained, tried to focus through the noise, to visualize the blade, long and wasp-waisted, with letters in no human tongue marching up the fuller, dark against the metal’s purple sheen...
“Watch out!” Sakura shouted, and then what felt like a flash flood knocked him flying. He tucked and rolled and came back up and saw that the Beast was free again, golden blood smoking and burning the grass and earth under its claws to sick black mud. Sakura’s rush of violet-veined power had thrown him out of the way of its first charge, but the Beast tore at the ground and bellowed after him, its nearest head snaking eyelessly, jagged jaws gaping wider than his own height as though to swallow the one that had wounded it whole.
Shirou dived forward, under the head’s motion, and seized Arondight in both hands, swinging the heavy sword with all his strength to bite deeply into the neck passing beside him even as he spun away from the spray of molten poison that served the Beast for blood and the thrashing of its amputated stump.
Across the clearing, he saw one of the Beast’s heads dive into a flowing dome of violet-veined shadow, black fluid crawling and clinging as it spread up the monster’s neck and golden boils began to erupt from below the liquid surface - boils that were, in turn, filled in by thin but rapidly thickening threads of darker purple as corruption and consumption struggled against each other.
Another reared high above the battle, poised to come down like a hammer, but was pierced through by a flashing streak of mulicolored light - a streak that was followed a moment later by another, and another, and a hundred more, riddling the black menace of it like a machine gun chewing apart a demonstration target. When the stump finally fell to earth, bleeding gold, Rin raised one index finger to her lips and blew across it.
The fourth of the remaining heads struck at Ilya, standing rooted in one place and lit by the azure glow of gathering power. A few feet away, its strike was pre-empted by her release of the energy she’d summoned, a thundering torrent of mystic might that momentarily turned night into day and rose into the distant sky like a beacon without the slightest concern for any mere piece of legendary monster that might have happened to be in the way. The blast was so intense that it didn’t merely remove the Beast’s offending cranium, but also cauterized the wound so deeply that not a single drop of gold leaked out of the charred ash.
Ilya smirked at Rin, and started to say something, some taunt, but Shirou wasn’t able to hear what it was because that was the point at which the Beast’s tail caught him and knocked him into the air for one of the heads to snap out of the air-
Ilyasviel screamed and threw a blast of azure fire that, less prepared than her previous strike, merely splashed off of the Beast’s scales-
Rin fired, once, missed, again, barely nicked the neck of the head coming towards him, ran out of time-
A great wet rope of liquid purple blackness unfurled and stretched towards him, racing to pull him out of the way of those jaws, and losing-
Arondight Broke in his hands, and he cast the twisted blade like a javelin.
The gleaming point found the inner right of that head’s four gleaming eyes, and punched through it, into the skull - terrible brilliance lit the other three, and the gaping mouth, from within, as the releasing energies of the Phantasm’s destruction burned away everything they could reach, delayed only slightly by immortal bone and scale - and then out the back in an explosion of gold and lavender.
A moment later, the gentle grasp of Sakura’s magic had snatched him out of the air and into her arms. “Don’t scare me like that!” she scolded, and a moment later his already aching ribs protested still harder as Ilya piled on from the other side.
“This really isn’t the-” time, he started to say, and cut off with an involuntary shout as the last head of the Beast struck down to devour the three of them and Rin as well in a single bite.
There was no time for him to form Rho Ais again, Ilya had her back to it, Sakura’s black oil was rising but too slowly-
Rin stepped in front of them and, smirking, tossed something tiny and glittering into the monster’s maw.
He had just enough time to see the magical explosion begin to blow the last head apart before the splattering tide of gold and black poured all over the four of them.
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."