First Round Failure

On an unknown island, crafted by a whim through magic, perfectly natural rain falls against perfectly mundane glass. It is a window, set into the high wall of a warehouse attached to a textiles factory. Rusted and neglected, automation stilled, a great network of machines and empty workstations stand sentinel in the dark. Busted lights and a clouded sky conspire to throw everything into the kind of dimness that distorts space and distance. Besides the patter of storm against the building, the only sound is disembodied voices.

A young woman with long, dark hair and strange, yellow eyes sits on a dusty crate of rotted cloth bolts. A blue aluminum baseball bat rests between her knees, and she looks at a virtual pane floating free in the air, like a software window projected into real space. The voices come from it, as well as transcriptions of speech. With a swipe of her hand, she cuts off a voice file of a fat man grunting and the next clip plays.

"So now it's working? Aw man! I thought I was already speaking to the others. There goes my introduction. Welp, anyway guys, I just wanted to drop by and say hi!" A quirk of disbelief crosses the focused woman's face.

"So, like, I found out I'm a Servant, which is cool, I guess. I got this thing called Noble Spasm.... wait! My bad. Noble Phantasm, still cool though! Alrighty, catch you later, Grail War buddies!" The taunting voice of a middle-aged man in a high-ceilinged library echoes in the woman's memories. Cool-toned explanations of outrageous bloodsport, given with all the gravitas of a brunch order. The young woman -- Ms. Victory Gunn, although the only people to call her that are the intake staff at certain jails -- grimaces to suppress the roil of disgust she feels. Her belly stops turning.

Is this man in the recording as cruel a sadist to dismiss the war so easily, or is he just an idiot? Impossible to say yet.

With another swipe, massive text blocks up the whole window. HELLO. Absent-mindedly, Vex -- as her groupies and friends know her -- tucks hair behind one ear. She rests her chin on one hand. It distorts her plain-jane features. When nothing else presents itself, she swipes with her free hand again and another video file plays. Instead of a grinning goofy guy like before, a grim-faced pretty girl takes up the view.

"It is a pleasure to meet you all. Truly. I have little interest in attaining the grail. I simply hope to see that any worthy wish is fulfilled and would offer my support to participants carrying such wishes." Vex shakes her head at hearing these words. A worthy wish could mean anything, to a stranger.

"To those that walk across clay with me, I would hope that we might delay drawing blood should we happen upon each other. To all willing to entertain my request...might I know what has driven you to this war?"

At this last part, Vex makes her first sound out loud in a long while. She scoffs. Then she talks to herself, voice dripping with derision.

"She must think we're so stupid. Information is power. She gave up none and wants some for free?" A tap in the air and the virtual window is dismissed. Vex uses the bat like a cane to help her stand up. Her thoughts turn to how easily disinfo spreads and wonders idly how that might be a tool in the future.

"Was that everything?"

The new voice, with a 19th century American drawl, comes from a man at the edge of the room that Vex has been ignoring like a mannequin. The greasy coif and bagged eyes of the moustachioed, short fellow make him look like a bad cosplay of Edgar Allen Poe. The effect is ruined by his receding hairline and stiff, military posture.

"Why do you care, 'Archer'?" Vex's reply is filled with undisguised sarcasm.

The man smirks, unable to hide his own condescension and dislike in return. "Intelligence. Reconaissance. The early stage is for gathering information, not giving it. As you said, Mistress. I simply desire to know if this well of information has been tapped for now."

"So much for chain of command. Not sure why insubordination was programmed into a soldier."

The man, a magical incarnation of a mythologized Frederick T. Ward, blows right passed unfamiliar terms. "Insubordination is, unfortunately, one of the more verifiable accusations leveled against me in my by-gone time in the army. But, you still have not answered my question."

"It's tapped." Vex's eyes glare through the dark, shining more than they should have the light for. The yellow irises stand out sharply, as if faintly lit from within. And they were. Magical circuits wove themselves into her very flesh, causing her direct commands to become heavy with hypnotic suggestion. "Enough of this bullshit, Archer. Tell me your name."

Ward, having no protections against magic or mental influence, and drilled for years of his life to answer to orders given to him, feels the words compelled up his throat like vomiting air. He struggles against it, desperate to hold on to his protection of obscurity, to stay a stranger to the enemies that surround him at all sides: which he is clever enough to realize includes the woman who magically contracts his very soul. He must speak the truth, the way he had to breathe and eat and shit when he was still alive.

But not the whole truth.

"Frederick." He spits out the name like a poisoned seed. The compulsion fulfilled, he gives his Mistress an expression of subtle, overwhelming anger. Stone dead, eyes cutting.

Vex gives the same expression back.

With a lift and turn of one hand, Ward gestures for his army to spill forth. The shades of mercenaries -- Frenchmen, Mexicans, American rejects -- and Chinese peasants reforged as Westernized soldiers manifest and fill the room. Terrible men, men in bright layered uniform and turbans, men with the latest in American gunsmithing technology from the Civil War era, men with total loyalty to Ward and to no one and nothing else. Men so proud of themselves and so chained to their commander that they breach death itself. They keep manifesting, stepping out from the ether, spilling into the hall and the factory beyond, a great chain of armed specters. They solidify into reality, gun barrels glinting oily in the dim light. Reeking of sweat and malice.

They obscure Ward, except for his glaring face. They surround Vex, all barely out of the range of her still-resting bat. Their weapons not pointing directly at her, but close enough they can be raised, braced, and fired any instant. All of them, the whole hoard, tensed and listening hard for Ward's spoken commands. For a moment and signal they, too, were trained in when they, too, once lived.

Vex does not change her defiant bearing a single twitch. Ward is the one to break the silence first. He does it by dismissing her with his gaze and ordering about his men.

"Break into squads. We need to scout the area, get a feel for the land and its dangers. I also want the building secured and reinforced where it can be. It's no fortress, but we can do our best for a night or two. And...," he breaks in his easy speech, with more powerful charisma and confidence than he ever displayed in his 30 living years, to give a meaningful look to one of his most trusted subordinates. "...my best should stay right here. To guard the Mistress." His double-meaning comes across effortlessly. In his legend, he has grown beyond the rough-shod braggart he remembers being. It fills him with self-regard and new authority.

"No."

Men all around her give her side-eye and sneers as they continue on with their activity. She is less than nothing to all of them.

Her spirit is unwavering. Her back burns as black ink fades away, hidden beneath layers of cloth and thick black leather. The Sierpiński triangle there -- the visible form of her regenerating Command Seals -- loses its third and smallest iteration. Hidden away entirely, it decays into lower complexity. And Ward's mind is broken by their power, carried by the undeniable command of Vex's hateful voice.

"You will dismiss your Noble Phantasm until I alone tell you to use it."

With a potency that few in all of human history have ever matched, with a purity of purpose that Vex can bend to no other use, the Seal rips through Ward with undeniable compulsion. She was quite literally born for this, for the overwhelming empowerment of Servants like him when all is in alignment, and to break their spirits when they aren't. He, with his weakness in the supernatural, has no ability at all to resist the power of her Command Seals. Even before he is recovered from the reeling mental vertigo force of her enchanted will, the army is gone. Forced back into the unreality contained within himself and his identity. He snarls, teeth bared, floating on fury like a battleship. He tries to defy her with everything inside him, but it is like throwing a handful of sand at a castle wall.

The words, their direction transmitted, become somehow less weighted. They have the airy tone of normal spoken speech once more.

"All of these ghouls running around just give us away."

Ward's hands tremble in rage. His supernatural speed moves him at the speed of her rushing words, drawing pistol and charging forward.

"You won't cause my death." Again, the command seal burns. Now only four large triangles, stacked together. A simple, familiar shape in the modern world. He is wracked with the effort to still himself, and with the effort to fight against his enslavement and murder her, kill her for yoking him, for denying him his glory as a soldier. He has killed for less, killed thousands for less, spending his life to turn blood to gold. He has already struck Vex, knocking her to the ground. The Colt pistol in his hand, trembling with his normal human strength pushing against the invisible wall of her compulsion on him, like he was struggling against the super-magnets he does not know exist, bucks and fights against him. Even his weapons, manifestations of his soul, rebel against him.

Ward pulls the trigger. Again and again, until the cylinder is emptied, and still many times after. His rage in every empty click of the hammer. Vex, her hair messily draped across her face and glued in place by the blood coming from her temple, looks up at him from her place crumpled and cringing on the ground. She glares at him through the gaps in her veil of hair. Though instinct makes her shield her body defensively from the enraged man-shaped magical construct above her, Vex's yellow eyes blaze with her own rage, her own defiance.

"Fine," growls Ward. "Not your death."

He kicks her, as hard as he can, in the gut. She reaches out to shield herself, but he's so fast that moves in blurs of motion. Ward stomps on her legs, skitters back when she jabs fruitlessly with her strange metal club, and closes back in right after. He flips his revolver in his grip, holding on to the barrel, and kneels down to use it like a hammer against her skull, shoulder, blocking bat. She is a small-time ruffian with no training, strength, or grace. He is the empowered perfection of a life-time killer of men. It is not a contest. She is like a prey animal caught by a bear.

"Fuck you!," she snarls through bloodied teeth, voice thick with pain, shame, and anger. "Kill yourself!!" It foams from enraged spittle, conveying a killing intent that Vex has felt countless times in her young life but never actualized.

In a swift, perfect motion that is pure physical poetry, Ward draws his second pistol in his left hand, places the barrel to the roof of his mouth, and fires.

Vex scrambles back on all fours, bat clattering away from her loose grip. Her wild eyes, previously darkened in uncontrollable rage, are now wrenched all the way open in child-like shock. The body of Frederick T. Ward falls away and dissolves into fragments of multicolor light, like flat triangular glitter of irregular dimension, like a thousand wings of tiny butterflies shorn apart in a terrible wind. Before he even hits the ground, he is dissolved. Returned to the source of magic and myth once more.

Vex, in abject horror, vomits on herself. Shock overwhelms her. Her back, naked of the last command seal -- for now -- has a numbing coolness. Her head pounds with the migraine of adrenaline and the concussion her dead Servant gave her. Her arms, maybe broken and maybe just bruised and sprained, throb and stab in unignorable pain. She looks all around her, startling at every noise, and pulls at her scalp with fistfuls of hair. Already, silently, she is crying.

It will take hours for her to calm down. Even longer for her to trick herself into thinking that all of it, every moment, was justified. But for as long as she lives, whether it be hours or decades, she will never forget the sight. She will never forget the look of him, hate pouring from his eyes like the spears from the Sun, as his head bloomed open.

Outside, the rain persists. Ignorant and uncaring.