Reborn in Type-Moon: Starting by Adopting Sakura - Chapter 56

A few minutes earlier, Yuu had hauled himself up the rocky slope toward the Einzbern forest, scrambling over loose stones and dead branches until he found a decent vantage point.

Nothingness ran through his body like a constant electrical current, automatically canceling out anything that tried to mess with him—poison, curses, mind control, the usual magi bullshit. But he could also push it outward, creating a bubble that blocked magical senses from picking him up. Combined with his Night Veil cloak, it made him essentially invisible to supernatural detection.

The downside was that it also made him half-blind to everything else. Like trying to watch a movie through frosted glass.

So when he pressed the binoculars and night-vision goggles to his eyes, he could see the figures moving around in that crater down there, but he couldn't make out what techniques they were using or how their magical energy was flowing. It was like watching a silent film with half the frames missing.

He pulled back the Nothingness, just for a second, to get a clearer picture—

And one of the Servants in the red bodysuit immediately snapped his head up and stared right at him.

Then the bastard drew his bow and fired.

Yuu's brain went blank for a full second. "Are you serious right now?"

Masters weren't supposed to be detectable by Servants, especially not from over a kilometer away. Unless this guy had some kind of supernatural perception ability that made him basically a walking radar dish.

But even then, to just fire off a massive attack in the middle of a five-way Servant brawl? Was he completely insane, or just didn't give a damn about the consequences?

The arrow screamed across the night sky like a miniature comet, trailing sparks and leaving a burning contrail in its wake. The magical energy packed into it made the air itself howl.

Yuu's Night Veil rippled around him, the black fabric shifting and shimmering with layers of inscribed protective spells.

In the split second before the arrow arrived, he expanded Nothingness outward. A three-meter sphere of absolute nullification formed around him, a zone where the laws of physics went to die.

That was what Nothingness did—it materialized impossibility itself. When something attacked him, the domain generated an "anti-substance," a conceptual opposite that erased whatever touched it. Not blocked, not deflected. Erased.

The Noble Phantasm-grade arrow hit the boundary of Nothingness and simply stopped existing. No crash, no explosion, no dramatic light show. One moment it was there, the next it wasn't, like reality had just deleted it from the equation.

But all that compressed magical energy had to go somewhere.

BOOM!

The hillside exploded. A fireball the size of a house consumed everything within fifty meters, turning ancient trees into splinters and baking the rocky soil into glass. The shockwave rolled like an earthquake, and the heat was enough to sear the lungs of anything breathing within a hundred yards.

Except for a perfect sphere in the dead center of it all. Three meters of complete stillness, untouched by flame or force or sound. Yuu stood in that pocket of nothingness, watching the inferno rage around him like he was standing behind bulletproof glass.

He wiped phantom sweat from his brow. “Whew… close call.”

What he'd just pulled off should have been impossible without all those brutal years of training with Nothingness, he'd be nothing but charcoal and bone fragments right now.

His mood went black. That white-haired prick in the red bodysuit had some serious balls, trying to blow him up from a kilometer away. Fine. When this was all over, he'd make sure to return the favor—with interest.

Behind him, the twisted wreckage of his car was still smoking.

He slipped out of the crater and started working his way down the ridge, using the scattered boulders and fallen trees as cover.

…

Down in the clearing, Archer let his bow fade away in a shower of golden sparks. His Hawk's Eye was still active, turning his vision into something that could pick out a mouse from three miles away.

The hilltop was a smoking crater now. Whatever had been up there was gone—either vaporized completely or buried under a few tons of molten rock.

But something felt wrong. His target-marking skill wasn't registering a kill, and that usually meant the bastard was still breathing somewhere.

Archer had spent enough time being jerked around by the Counter Force to know when a job wasn't finished. Once he got into hunting mode, he didn't stop until the target was confirmed dead. It was the one thing that kept him sane in this endless cycle of cleanup duty.

The automatic detection system they'd loaded him with could mark anything within two kilometers, though heavy concealment spells could shrink that range down to almost nothing. That's why he'd been prowling through Fuyuki's streets for days, waiting for a ping.

High above in the treetops, Gilgamesh watched the whole show with mild amusement.

He was after the same anomaly that was screwing with the world, but even his supernatural sight couldn't penetrate whatever was hiding it. All he saw was a blank spot where something should be.

But if the Counter Force's attack dog was already on the hunt, why bother getting his hands dirty? He could sit back, enjoy the entertainment, and occasionally peek at Archer's future to see how things would play out.

Speaking of which, that future had just arrived.

His body dissolved into golden light, and then he was gone.

…

The moment Archer fired that shot, every eye in the clearing locked onto him.

He wanted to check if his target was actually dead, but one wrong move right now would turn this standoff into a bloodbath. And he was standing in the middle of four other Servants who looked ready to tear him apart.

"You're Archer, aren't you?" Iskandar asked. "Mind explaining what that was about?"

Archer scratched the back of his head and put on his best sheepish grin. “If I said my hand slipped, would you believe me?”

Dead silence.

Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.

The other Servants stared at him like he'd just told them the moon was made of cheese.

Meanwhile, wrapped in his Night Veil, Yuu was creeping along the tree line instead of getting the hell out of dodge like any sane person would. But sanity had never been his strong suit.

If he wanted to crush that white-haired prick—or at least scan his Saint Graph—he needed to be close enough to do it. And right now, with five Servants bunched together and their Masters probably lurking somewhere nearby, this felt like the best chance he’d ever get to push his research forward.

Too bad he had no idea which Master belonged to the red-suited archer. If he did, he could end this whole fight in about ten seconds. A dead Master meant a dead Servant, and that asshole had earned himself a very painful death for that sneak attack.

Suddenly…

Golden light flared in front of him.

A figure materialized on the branches ahead—tall, built like a classical statue, and radiating an arrogance that made him want to punch the guy just for existing.

“Caster. Gilgamesh.” The King of Heroes was never the type to waste words on introductions, which only made the moment feel all the more bizarre. He tilted his head, almost amused. “How about we have a little chat?”

Yuu's hand drifted toward his cloak. This night just kept getting better and better.