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Honestly, Max had set the pain threshold on his in-game hardware pretty conservatively.
It made sense, when you thought about it. A living thing that couldn't feel pain couldn't locate its injuries. Basic game design philosophy. You wanted players to feel the hits, to feel present in the world. Some degree of pain feedback was necessary.
Even so, the Archer's Master—currently somewhere in the dust cloud that used to be a restaurant wall—was crying like a toddler who'd been told the ice cream shop was closed.
Wailing. Sobbing. Full production.
[Spectator]: Is he... is he actually crying?
[MaverickFanclub]: LMAOOO grown man sobbing in a video game
[Tactical_Analysis]: I mean, it probably does hurt. Physics-based pain feedback is no joke.
[JusticeForServants]: He deserves it. He called his Servant code. He CALLED HIM CODE.
[MaverickDefense]: Trust Maverick. He's got this.
Maverick was tuning all of it out.
From a tactical standpoint, the crying was actually useful. The man couldn't control the volume even if he'd wanted to—every movement, every panicked scrabble through the debris, was broadcasting his position like a broken car alarm. Maverick moved to the edge of the collapse zone, sniper rifle raised, tracking the sound. The dust was thick enough that direct sightlines were useless, but he didn't need sightlines for this. He needed ears.
There.
He put a shot into the general vicinity and was rewarded with a fresh scream.
He ejected the casing with practiced efficiency.
As for why he wasn't just switching to the submachine gun—ammunition management. The sniper rifle hit harder per round, and in a situation this chaotic, efficiency mattered. He wasn't going to waste a full magazine suppressing a dust cloud.
The screaming shifted in pitch. Something had changed.
"I'm—I'm using a Command Seal! I command with a Command Seal—AGH!"
Bang.
The shot came through the haze like a period at the end of a sentence.
You had to give the man some credit for the instinct, Maverick thought. When you're losing, call your Servant. That was the correct move, technically. The problem was execution. Specifically, the problem was that inside a dust cloud, with an enemy sniper tracking your every sound, raising your right hand was less "summoning backup" and more "pointing a glowing red spotlight directly at your wrist."
The Command Seal hand hit the ground.
Maverick lined up the kill shot.
He was just settling into the stance—weight forward, breath controlled, the crosshairs finding their target through the settling grey air—when something caught his eye.
A glint. Far off. High ground.
It lasted maybe a quarter of a second.
Maverick's body moved before his brain finished processing. He released the rifle, let it fall, and threw himself backward in the same motion—mouth already forming the silent incantation of Five Times Acceleration—and flipped into the ruins behind him in a single fluid backflip.
The bullet grazed his foot on the way out.
It punched through the leather of his shoe and buried itself in a red leather chair nearby with a crack that echoed off the broken walls.
[GriffithStream]: Maverick, seriously, are you hacking?
[ShockAndAwe]: HOLY CRAP there's ANOTHER expert out here?!
[Salty]: Kill stealer incoming, I can feel it
[Theory]: Could be an Assassin's Master? Stealth build?
[MaverickStan]: Maverick, call Artoria back first!! Don't be a hero!!
The chat had a point about the kill-stealing.
Because the mystery shooter, instead of following up on Maverick, pivoted immediately. The next shot came from a completely different angle, punching through the dust cloud with surgical precision—and Kiritsugu's Master, who had been hidden and screaming and actively dying in there, stopped making noise.
Permanently.
Maverick stared at where the body had to be and felt a very specific kind of numb.
Did this game seriously just let someone else steal my kill?
He was still processing that when the next shot rang out—and this time it wasn't aimed at him either. He followed the trajectory and found the target: a young man standing in the middle of what remained of the commercial street, accompanied by a very familiar Servant.
Maverick blinked.
He looked harder.
Medea. That's Medea. Which means that's—
The young man moved.
And for the record, the head-dodge he pulled on the incoming bullet was the cleanest thing Maverick had seen in a game in his life. No flinch, no scramble, no desperate dive—just a calm, almost lazy tilt of the head as the round passed through the space where his skull had been.
[WhiplashViewer]: WAIT WAIT WAIT
[ProcessingError]: Did he just... DODGE A BULLET WITH A HEAD SHAKE?
[Conspiracy]: Maverick I take back everything I said. THIS is what actual cheating looks like.
[IdentityRevealed]: Hold on. Is that Medea? Is that MAX?! Maverick, you just sniped the DEVELOPER?!
[Chaos]: THE PRODUCER IS CHEATING FOR HIMSELF NOW
[Disbelief]: Why is it okay for the Streamer to cheat but not okay for Maverick?? This game is unplayable, I'm uninstalling. (I'm not uninstalling.)
Maverick's eyes went wide.
Max.
He hadn't recognized him at first—the character model was different, something that wasn't available in the standard player builds. But that was definitely his face. And the Servant standing at his shoulder, with her silver hair and her staff and that look on her face that said she was thirty seconds from incinerating a city block—that was absolutely Medea.
Maverick had caused a lot of problems in his streaming career.
This one was shaping up to be in his top five.
Back down the street, Max had stopped moving.
He'd been chasing after Artoria—the brief glimpse of her passing by had made his hand twitch toward the follow button—when the gunshots had pulled his attention back toward the restaurant. He hesitated, weighing options, and then the audience vote had settled it for him before he'd even posted the poll. Overwhelming majority: check out the restaurant first.
He turned around.
He was almost to the entrance when the bullet came.
It appeared in his peripheral vision as a heat signature and a sound, and his body processed the Killing Intent Perception skill before his conscious mind did—his head moved, the round grazed his cheek close enough that he felt the displaced air, and then it was past him and buried in the wall behind him.
He straightened up and looked at the hole in the wall.
Huh.
The chat was already melting down. He could feel the stream exploding without looking at it.
Medea, however, was not looking at the chat. Medea was looking in the direction the bullet had come from, and the expression on her face had gone completely still in a way that was much more alarming than anger.
Her hand found her staff.
She tapped it against the broken pavement once.
And then the magic circles opened.
High-Speed Divine Words: A-Rank.
There was a reason Casters from the Age of Gods occupied a different category in any serious discussion of Servant power levels. Modern mages built their spells carefully, constructing each component in sequence, layering bounded fields and activation conditions and fail-safes. It took time. It took preparation.
Medea did not need time.
The Divine Words she spoke were older than human language. The sounds she produced were physically impossible for modern human vocal anatomy. And "High-Speed" meant exactly what it said: the incantation was done before most opponents could register it had started.
What followed were beams of arcane light.
Dozens of them.
Hundreds.
They didn't know exactly where the shooter was—but they knew the direction. And for High-Thaumaturgy of this caliber, "general direction" was entirely sufficient.
The beams swept through the commercial district like a slow, methodical demolition. Buildings that had been standing for decades were simply... divided. Sliced clean through at precise angles, like someone had taken a laser cutter to a scale model. The structures didn't explode—they just stopped being intact. Upper halves slid from lower halves with a sound like grinding stone and settled into dust.
Half the block disappeared in approximately four seconds.
[GrandmaWouldCry]: WHAT
[ServantTierList]: okay I need to revise every tier list I've ever made
[Shaking]: "Casually using small skills." CASUALLY.
[FateExpert]: This is why you don't let Medea get comfortable. This is EXACTLY why you don't let Medea get comfortable.
[HolyGrailNeeded]: I must pull for Medea. I must pull for Medea right now.
[WhereShouldTheyBe]: That backstabber is dead right? Like definitely dead?
[ChaoticUpdate]: Wait wait wait. Why is there a Kiritsugu falling from the sky?
[JADE]: Holy—JADE!! JADE IS HERE!!
There was a sound.
It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't the thunderous arrival the moment deserved. It was the specific, slightly unglamorous sound of a body landing on pavement—somewhere between a slap and a thud, like a heavy parcel dropped from a moderate height.
An Emiya Kiritsugu—a different one, notably less injured than the last one—hit the street in front of them.
And standing on his head, her weight distributed with the casual confidence of someone who had done this many times before, was a small figure in an elaborate purple robe.
She stepped down from the head lightly, each footfall precise, and regarded the assembled audience with two crescent-moon eyes curved into a smile that suggested she found everything about this situation personally delightful.
"Oh my~" she said, her voice like warm honey poured over shaved ice. "Oh my, oh my. Master, I did tell you not to go around ambushing people. And look—didn't you get exactly what you deserved? Now look at all this dust on my clothes. What a mess."
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