"Going somewhere?" came the voice from the dark.
The woman standing on the hill that overlooked the battlefield turned calmly to regard its source. "Oh, it's you." The low hood hid most of her face, but her lips, at least, were smiling contemptuously.
"Did you think that you could fool me twice?" he asked her, stepping out of the forest and into the moonlight. He was smiling, too, and his hood was thrown back, but his eyes were still hidden by the strip of black cloth tied across them. "Or just that the sight you blinded was the only resource I had? That I'd never know to stop you?"
"Fool. I've already won." Medea said, and raised her hand. "There's nothing you can do to do that."
"Hmph. Sucker." She had been too slow; the levinbolts splashed and redirected away from his shield, and a darker light flared and consumed the ward he held in the fingers of his raised hand.
And something changed. Her hidden eyes widened, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up as she tried to figure out just what.
"On the first day of the first month in some distant year, the whole sky froze golden," he said. "Some said it was the aftermath of the radium bomb, while others told of a final retribution, a terrible revenge, of the gods."
"What?" she asked, not because she cared but because it would buy her time.
"You did very well, turning us against each other - winnowing out those weakened by the battles without ever revealing that you'd survived. But... I refuse to, I cannot allow someone like you or Kotomine or Matou to gain the power of the Grail. At any cost." He smiled, and the expression was grim and more than a little mad. "Kind is not the same as soft, Medea. Didn't it occur to you to wonder what happened to Orengo after her Servant was defeated? To McRemitz?"
There was a smell of moisture in the air, wet and cool and heavy.
"And now that I've told you that, do you think I'm going to use their power to kill you?"
It began to rain with a soft patter of water droplets - not vertically, like a natural rain, but spiraling inwards from all angles to a single point between the two of them where a glistening, mirror-smooth orb of clear water began to grow.
Quickly she tried to phase away, to fade back into the psychic background as a shadow of herself, safe from almost any attack. She couldn't; that tension she had felt earlier locked her into the physical plane.
"You think too small," he snarled savagely.
The gem-like orb grew in moments to the size of a small house, then, without warning or fanfare, contracted inwards, like a time-lapse of an explosion run in reverse.
At its center, a pinprick of fire formed.
Then there was a terrible ghastly light.
Then nothing.
^_^
Ja, -n
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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"