From Fake Dreams

42

The room was empty.

"No."

As were the others on the floor.

"Not here either."

As was the building itself.

"Perhaps..."

The basement... yielded a peculiar sight that had not been expected. Unfortunately, it was not what she had been looking for nor was it appealing to her in any particular way.

After ensuring that there was no hidden passageway or secret that could be of use, the intruder set aflame the disgusting room before destroying the supports to collapse the ceiling. Using others for one's benefit was certainly something that she was familiar with, but even she had a limit to the unnecessary cruelty she was willing to submit her victims to.

"Tch." She half swore out a word of power to scan the entire compound for human life and ended up with nothing. Since she had just destroyed the bounded fields that surrounded the compounds, she was confident that her spell would be unobstructed...

... And ended up with nothing all the same.

"How?" The Witch bit her lip in frustration. She had been keeping an eye on the Church since the earlier parts of the War in case she wanted to make her move. Granted she didn't know every exact habit of the peculiar man, but she had observed enough to know that he always left the complex through the front door.

A front door that had not been opened since Gilgamesh had left nearly four hours ago if her familiars were still functioning correctly. Her slaves were on their way to attack her former hideout to buy her time and mask her movements soon.

Be that as it may though, it was abundantly clear that Kirei Kotomine was not at his post.

She was running out of time. With the King of Heroes occupying the attention of the boy, Saber, and possibly even Berserker, now was her best opportunity to tilt things to her favor. Taking the Priest's Command Seals would provide a huge boon to her efforts, allowing her to utilize her underlings in ways that could potentially enable her to destroy anyone there should she be wise in their uses.

Assassin and Rider would do well to weaken Archer and her counterpart enough to prevent them from acting for the next few days if not take out their forces. She had sent the Fraga along with an enchanted gem that would generate a small army's worth of bone soldiers to counter the lesser beasts in Aeaea to even the odds.

The fact that she was forcing Rider to fight her allies and Assassin to kill his son was just a convenient bonus in her opinion. More chaos and confusion to tilt things more to her favor.

The only reason why she kept Lancer back was just in case everything went pear shaped and she needed a strong last line of defense immediately. Even weakened, Saber and Berserker could tear through half of her defenses just by running forward if left unchecked. Archer and the other Caster were annoyances at best so long as she kept an eye on them, but annoyances that she could not afford to deal with outside of her terms right now.

There was always the chance that the Fraga would die or be freed in combat, which would in turn sever her control over the Irishman, but she had doubts that would come to pass. Those little Banshee brats had proven themselves to be exceptionally frustrating when it came to their so called 'mother'.

No matter. She had given instructions to her slaves that they were to retreat should one of them die or be rendered unable to fight to minimize losses. She had put enough power and magic behind the order to at least be sure that they would go through with that action should they put up enough resistance to not kill any of their targets.