The spear pierced through Semiramis' body without obstruction. With the central area as the starting point, the already battered Hanging Garden collapsed and shattered piece by piece.
Semiramis and Karna began dissipating at the same time.
"I'll answer one of your questions, Assassin," Karna said, looking at Semiramis in his final moments. "What the poison witch truly desires might just be the purest water."
He revealed a faint smile as his body turned illusory and finally disappeared.
However, that one sentence gave Semiramis pause.
"Is that so..." she murmured. A bitter smile appeared on her charming face. "You really are...annoying, Lancer."
What the poison witch truly desired might just be the purest water. No wonder she had agreed to help her Master. She sought not vain lordship of the world, just yearning for that beautiful paradise her Master envisioned.
"I don't need you to remind me..." Smiling lightly, Semiramis slowly faded away.
...
The aerial garden was collapsing, falling apart piece by piece.
Mordred was baffled. "What's going on?"
"I...I don't know..." Kiara responded anxiously. Huge boulders crashed down around them, crushing the monsters and worms beneath.
More boulders came plummeting toward them, but they were destroyed by Kiara's gleaming white hands.
"Let's get out first!" Mordred said urgently.
"Okay!" Kiara nodded. As she prepared to help them escape, her hands transformed into a gigantic white hand, tearing open the wall of the hanging garden.
Mordred was startled, then looked to her.
"Wha- What is it?" Kiara asked timidly.
"Aren't you unexpectedly capable?" Mordred laughed, then said seriously, "We have to get out now!"
"Oh!" Blushing, Kiara caught up to Mordred and they raced toward the opening she had created in the disintegrating Hanging Garden.
They walked out from the crumbling Garden onto the plains. In an instant, they saw an extremely shocking scene unfold before them.
"Good heavens! What...what is this?" Kiara stammered, shocked speechless. The sight before her was truly too horrifying for words.
They stood atop the collapsing ruins, high enough to view the entire plain outside Trifas. However, the scene below was indescribable.
Kiara felt a wave of awe sweep over her, as if she had descended into hell itself. Beneath the pitch black sky, one wooden stake after another erupted from the earth, so numerous they were uncountable. Impaled atop these countless stakes were grotesquely shaped Chthonian.
Some stakes pierced through their heads, some directly through their jaws...One worm creature after another was impaled through their twisted bodies, suspended high atop the wooden stakes.
And most spectacular of all were the two titanic monsters in the distance. One giant and one enormous Chthonian, their hulking bodies around 700 meters each, like true towering mountains crushing the earth beneath them.
Once they began moving, they would surely bring earthquakes and tidal waves upon the land. However, at this moment, these two colossal monsters had ceased all movement.
The reason - two even more gigantic stakes had speared through their bodies, like a skeletal frame locking them in place, temporarily preventing them from taking action.
And at this time, a rustling sound emerged from the ruins of the collapsed aerial garden behind them.
Mordred's eyes flashed. She whirled around, her blackish red sword stabbing towards the source of the noise.
An invisible blade blocked her attack with a clear, metallic ring.
"It's you," Mordred said, her surprise evident as she gazed at the woman crawling out from the wreckage.
The newcomer was identical to Mordred, like a mirror image of herself. Undoubtedly, this was Saber.
Saber nodded. "It's me."
Mordred sheathed her sword. However, when Saber noticed Kiara, her expression grew wary and hostile.
Seeing this, Mordred laughed. "I take it you've met that Beast before?"
Saber nodded, her caution fading. "Since you put it that way, this must be Miss Kiara then."
Kiara quickly bowed in apology. "Please forgive my other self for the trouble she caused you, Lady Arthur."
"No need. Rather, the experience helped me see my path more clearly."
Kiara looked at Saber curiously, but the other woman didn't elaborate further.
In the Beast's Paradise, Artoria had fulfilled her lifelong wish.
The Sword in the Stone was pulled out by another more worthy than herself. She chose to become that person's knight, eventually pacifying the turmoil in Britain. She then assisted the new king alongside the Knights of the Round Table in governing the country. Mordred's rebellion never happened, and Camelot lived on.
Even the territory expanded into Europe.
Having realized her lifelong dream, Artoria finally put away her armor and wandered the meadows as a carefree maiden.
No one called her heartless or placed heavy burdens on her shoulders anymore.
She indulged in bliss and leisure, free from responsibility or strife.
However, Shirou's light made her realize the painful truth. Indulging in falsehoods was irresponsible towards reality. It was merely self-deception. So she struggled free of the sweet dream and forced herself awake.
However...the difference was indeed too drastic.
Without Shirou's reminder, she might have fully succumbed to indulgence. Perhaps because she left the Paradise later, when she exited, she vaguely sensed Shirou's Paradise as well. She realized immediately that indulging there would betray others. So she tore apart her lovely dream, even destroying her weaker self, in order to exit first and awaken the rest...
The gap between her and Eternal King was truly too enormous.
Saber gave a bitter laugh. Perhaps the new king she had imagined in her Paradise...had been modeled after Eternal King...
"Is it just us left?" Mordred asked Saber.
She nodded. "Ruler and Nero were also caught by the Beast with me. We fell into the same Paradise. But after I awoke, I could not find any trace of them."
"I...I know about this..." Kiara timidly raised her hand. "I have some connection to my other self...so I can vaguely sense she devoured them..."
"Devoured them?" Saber looked at Kiara in surprise.
Kiara nodded. "Um... I can sense this vaguely...because my connection with her is not severed... It seems, lacking mana to leave this place, she randomly devoured things to replenish herself...those two ladies, it seems...they were consumed by my other self."
Saber: "..."
Mordred: "..."
"Wha-What is it?" Kiara asked timidly, as they stared at her.
"It's nothing," Mordred shook her head. "I just feel their luck is so awful...And..."
She turned to gaze upon the hellish scene. "I really didn't expect things to become like this."
"This is Vlad's Noble Phantasm," Saber said. "He likely deployed it on a large scale because of those monsters."
"I see..." Mordred furrowed her brows, then stood. "Let's regroup with him first."
"But you are the Red Faction's Saber," Saber looked at her.
"Don't be so obstinate," Mordred said. "Eternal King has perished with the Beast, and both Red and Black Factions were decimated. If we cling to trivialities now, we hardly deserve the title of Heroic Spirits."
Saber nodded, then pointed toward the battling beasts. "He should be over there!"
Mordred nodded, then glanced at Kiara. "Go ahead and clear the path."
"Huh?" Kiara started.
"We're Servants - we need our Master's magical energy to even function," she explained patiently. "But you're different. Anyway, don't you want to change and improve yourself? Look at this as training. Work hard under my guidance, and I'll train you. To be honest, you should feel happy. Plenty of people have asked me to tutor them and I've turned them all down."
"Uuu...I-I understand! Tha-Thank you very much, Master!"
Kiara tried to psych herself up.
She knew she had to work hard and get better if she wanted to change. No way did she want to end up useless baggage, much less turn into her other self.
Alright, time to do this!
Of course, Kiara was clueless that Mordred just wanted to save her mana. With all those freaky monsters around, plowing through would mean depending on her Noble Phantasm to sneak by. That'd waste a ton of mana. She'd already burned through nearly all the mana from that Command Spell.
Fortunately, her contract with her Master still existed, meaning he must still be alive.
Even better, now somebody was here to mow down the road ahead.
As expected from powers claimed from that [Beast.] Once Kiara activated her white hands, they were like the flashing image of a thousand-armed bodhisattva, grabbing up all the worms in the way and dumping them into her black hole. Super efficient - she rapidly cleared a path toward the Yggmillennia clan.
Though the true owner of that black hole might have some thoughts about her tossing all those nasty worms inside.
...
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