The tornado that rolled up again dragged the Pale Knight back, and it took a long time for his clone to reach the center of the desert.
However, there was no one there, and even the distortion of space had disappeared.
Only the deep ravines that can be called the 'scars of the world' were left. The center of the desert seemed to have been hollowed out, and a huge hemispherical pit emerged.
The Pale Knight rode the wind and circled the scene a few times, and then spread his body into the world.
He will not chase the disappearing heroic spirits because he is only here to eliminate the "thunder sound" that scares Chun. Since the sound has disappeared, there is no need for him to do anything extra.
So, after the aura of the Pale Knight and the two heroic spirits completely left, the desert finally returned to its former silence.
There were only some bodies of familiars (birds) on the ground. They were accidentally touched by the moving pale knight and fell into coma.
The moonlight shines on the earth as always.
Just like that, the first battle of this "False Holy Grail War" ended.
After feeling the huge power, the stalker increased his hostility and alert without saying a word.
The vampires guarding her were dumbfounded by the power of the King of Heroes and others, and couldn't help but exclaim: "It's so wonderful! It's simply beyond my imagination! This power is enough to ravage my servants to their heart's content!"
The magicians in the city had different reactions. Some sensed the danger and wanted to escape, while others became ambitious after seeing the miracle called the Heroic Spirit and planned to seize other people's master qualifications.
The surge of magic power with the desert as its source has even alerted the Clock Tower, the base of the Magicians Association in a foreign country.
Although there were no casualties, the unusual flow of magic power made the Magicians Association, which planned to wait and see, and the Holy Church, which was waiting to see what happened, change their minds.
This is definitely not a prank that can be ignored.
A real war between magicians was staged in the land called Snowfield.
In the face of this fact, the authenticity of this 'Holy Grail War' is no longer important.
············
The girl is a visitor who has just arrived in Snowfield.
He knew nothing about the Holy Grail War that had started half a day ago.
While checking something on her mobile phone, she walked into a drug store in the suburbs and asked if there were any cheap motels nearby.
The man looking after the shop, who wore a mohawk, told her the location of the motel in a kind tone contrary to his appearance. Although the man said there were ordinary hotels of the same price nearby, she declined politely.
The man looked at the girl strangely, and when he saw her hands and neck, he couldn't help but murmured: "Oh, your tattoos are so handsome."
The girl smiled in response. After leaving the store, she looked at her hands, and the same pattern appeared on her right hand and left hand.
She knew very well that the same patterns were engraved on her shoulders and back.
The girl is very young, not yet twenty years old. But because she has a baby face that is very immature even among Japanese people, she looks two or three years younger than her actual age.
Her dignified appearance suited her well to wearing those simple glasses. However, she seemed to be dissatisfied with this "dignity", so she dyed her bright black hair into an eye-catching blonde.
From a punk rock perspective, the pattern faintly revealed from her sleeves does indeed look like a part of punk fashion.
She looked at the two patterns and narrowed her eyes resentfully.
At this moment, the man with a mohawk ran out of the store and called behind the girl: "Hey, little girl."
"Um?"
The girl subconsciously turned around and saw the man throwing a mobile phone over.
"You left it behind."
"...Ah, sorry."
When she took the phone, she realized it was hers. She probably put the phone on the counter while talking to the man, and then simply forgot about it.
The girl held the phone, bowed deeply and said, "Thank you."
Seeing this action, the man with a mohawk asked curiously: "Although you have dyed your hair, you must be Asian, right? I guess you are Chinese, right? Are you Cambodian?"
Perhaps he was not familiar with the Japanese craftsmanship spirit, so for a moment he just thought that the girl was polite and did not think carefully.
"...I'm from Japan."
As soon as he finished speaking, the clerk with a mohawk opened his arms in an exaggerated gesture of friendship: "Japan! That's a great place! My cousin traveled to Japan before and was shocked by the number of vending machines there."
"Uh...hehe..." The girl smiled awkwardly, knowing that the other party was trying to get close to her.
However, the man's frank tone did make the expression on her face relax a little.
"you flatter me."
"My dad has been to Japan before, and the souvenirs he bought at an amusement park called KitsyLand are still displayed in my hometown. My dad also said that he saw ninjas. Are there really many ninjas in Japan?"
I don’t know if the male clerk made such a joke because he wanted to find a topic, or if he really thought so. I saw him with a hearty smile, and he was eager to continue the conversation...
A helicopter suddenly flew over from above, and the sound of the propeller's rotation wiped out the surrounding sounds and even the conversation between the two.
The helicopter flew very low, flying from the city to the desert.
When the noise finally died down, the man with the mohawk clicked his tongue.
"Helicopters have been flying around since this morning, which is really hindering our business! I was also thinking about how many pairs of earplugs I could sell, but in the end there were no customers at all."
Most pharmacies in the United States operate both convenience stores and grocery stores. Even this exaggeratedly dressed clerk is an out-and-out pharmacist and has received training in vaccinations. However, judging from the proportion of products displayed in the store, this
Home stores should be more inclined to sell groceries.
The girl listened to the man complaining, frowned and asked: "Starting from this morning?"
"What? Didn't you watch the news? I heard that a gas or oil pipeline exploded in the desert last night. Now the entire desert is prohibited from entering to avoid danger."
"...Does this kind of thing happen often?"
"No, I've lived here since I was born, and this is the first time I've heard of such a thing. I didn't even know there was such a terrifying thing buried under the desert."
While listening to the man's words, the girl quietly squinted her eyes behind her lenses and observed the helicopter disappearing in the distance.
She seemed to be challenging something, but also seemed to be afraid of something.
What the girl didn't know was that while observing the helicopter, she also became the object of observation by others.
············
Snowfield, North West.
Koltzman Special Orthodontics Center.
"It" stands guard on the outskirts of the city, thousands of kilometers away from rows of skyscrapers, at the junction of valleys and forests.
At first glance, it looks like a fortress protecting the city, but its height is not high enough. In addition, there are several surveillance towers built around this building that occupies a large area of flat land.
This is a common private prison in the United States.
The facility is under strict surveillance and is clearly isolated from the outside world by a wire fence surrounding it.
Private prisons refer to private prisons operated under the commission of state or federal governments. They are commercial institutions with various profit methods, including products produced by the labor of inmates.
Today, there are far more than two million inmates in this country, and state-run prisons alone cannot accommodate them. Therefore, private prisons have emerged in various places. In the eyes of ordinary citizens, having a private prison in Snowfield is nothing
Something incredible.
It would be better to say that many citizens did not even know it was a prison.
Therefore, those who know its "true face" can no longer refer to them as ordinary citizens.
Right now, inside this building.
In an "office" located underground in the prison.
This office is about the size of a basketball court.
There is a row of monitors on the wall of the dark room, and several men and women are switching screens one after another, conducting inspections in silence.
This space looks like a surveillance facility that a prison should have, but there are few monitors showing surveillance footage from inside the prison.
Most of the monitors display images from cameras installed in Snowfield City. From public to hidden, all surveillance images are being played out in real time.
There are also scenes of hotel rooms, which are not meant to cover up candid shots at all.
If you just look at these, you might just think that this is the control room of some intelligence agency - but there are some images that are obviously not taken by cameras.
These lenses have flexible perspectives and move around, as if they are possessed by bugs and mice.
A perspective that seemed to be moving in the air came to a certain building. At this time, the owner of the perspective was clearly reflected on the glass of the building's exterior wall - a bird flying in the sky.
If it were a bird-shaped robot, it could be accepted by the world as science that was slightly ahead of its time. But it was not a machine, but a real bird.
Yes, some of these perspectives come from "familiar".
In other words, this is not the control room of an ordinary organization, but belongs to a magician.
The visual information from the familiar and the images captured by ordinary cameras are gathered here. This is a space where magic and science coexist, which is one of the meanings of the existence of the Koltzman Special Correction Center.
The master of the control room and the familiars, Faldius, was monitoring the monitor with other operators. At this time, his eyes stopped in one place.
The other monitors were still switching screens. Faldius stared at one of the screens and pressed pause to observe what was reflected on the screen.
"……Well."
Faldius began to ponder with an expressionless expression.
"I thought it was a new magician who entered the city's enchantment. Who is this little girl?"
He used a connected machine to enlarge the image.
This camera is located in front of a drug store on the southern outskirts of the city. What captured the girl was not a familiar, but a state-of-the-art scientific camera, so even if the image was magnified more than ten times, it was still very clear.
What caught Faldius' attention was the back of the girl's hand.
In the picture, the girl's eyes are following the helicopter, and magic patterns appear on her hands.
——Command Seal?
This idea came to Faldius' mind, but he did not draw a conclusion.
He felt the magic with a very strange wavelength when the woman passed through the barrier.
Even after studying in the clock tower for so long, he still couldn't figure it out. Because this girl was a magician, but she had no intention of hiding her magic power.
Faldius ordered his men to monitor the city 24 hours a day in a corner of the large "workshop" located underground in the prison.
He also went to great lengths to set up barriers around the city to detect intruders, working with countless monitors. These are all to track the movements of magicians entering the city, but skilled magicians are usually good at hiding themselves
, people will not even notice that they have entered the barrier.
In other words, she couldn't even control the release of magic power, which proved that this girl was either a third-rate magician, or she was deliberately provoking him.
But the girl didn't seem to have discovered the barrier, so the reason for provocation was not valid.
Although Faldius thought so, he still believed that he should not draw conclusions prematurely.
After all, there is a precedent for Flat Eskardes.
A figure appeared in Faldius' mind. The young man took a long-distance bus here in a dignified manner and summoned the servant directly in the center of the park.
Although Faldius is a disciple of Langar, he is worried that his true identity will be exposed, so he has tried to avoid going too deep into the center of the clock tower. Even so, he has heard people call him "the taboo son of God"
Rumors of Flatt.
This has to be mentioned, Lord El-Melloi II, a magician who participated in the Fourth Holy Grail War and survived safely.
El-Melloi II taught the modern magic department in the Clock Tower, which was said to be superficial, but it trained several outstanding magicians in just a few years. This "genius instructor" took care of him the longest.
The young man is Flat Eskardes.
Faldius originally thought that the possibility of El-Melloi II participating in the Holy Grail War would be higher because he had experienced it once. But he did not expect that it would be a disciple of El-Melloi II who came alone, no...
…
It seems too early to say that we are going it alone.
Because according to the surveillance footage, he also saw another man following Flatt, who was very suspicious.
Because even with the surveillance and familiars covering the entire city, they still couldn't capture how this man appeared next to Flatt.
His appearance was very sudden, but there seemed to be no sense of violation at all.
Although Faldius once suspected that this man was the heroic spirit summoned by Frat, judging from various characteristics, he was just a human being anyway, a human being who did not even possess magic power.
In short, these were probably the group of people that puzzled Faldius the most.
The various actions that Flatt performed one after another were completely beyond his understanding as a magician. If it weren't for the fact that the Command Spell appeared in this boy's hand and summoned the heroic spirit, anyone would have thought that the boy just came to this place with his friends.