The Thirsty Girl's Guide To Summoning (Fate/Isekai)

Chapter 51: A Shadow Falls

The bars of sunlight in the Great Hall lengthened, but Jekyll's careful circuit of one of them as he paced never once passed through the sunshine, although he hardly seemed aware of his surroundings. He muttered to himself, one hand to his temple: denials, refusals and pleas for patience that never seemed to bring him away from the brink of madness.

With great effort, he seemed to be keeping his darker half suppressed in the wake of Lady Serendipity's disappearance. But Diarmuid, watching him, wondered what that actually meant when suppression rendered Jekyll nonfunctional.

Tora came up the stairs and offered Diarmuid a flatbread full of sliced meat, carrying a half-eaten one of her own. "How's he doing?"

"Thank you," said Diarmuid, accepting the snack. With Serendipity gone, it was more important than ever to eat regularly. Until she returned, the Servants would mostly be operating at near-mortal levels. "I don't think he's making very much progress beating back his beast."

With a sidelong look at Jekyll, Tora shrugged. She hadn't liked it very much when Jekyll had frightened Lady Ritsu by roaring at her to get away that morning. They'd tried to keep the children away from Jekyll, at his own desperate request, but Ritsu was hard to refuse. With Serendipity gone, she was the closest thing they had to a Master, even if she was far too young to be any kind of a commander.

"Maybe we should do more than watch. I don't like that we haven't heard from Lady Ren yet," she finally said. "We need to be looking for her, and he's making that a lot harder."

Diarmuid shifted uncomfortably, and then finished his flatbread rather than responding. Cú Chulainn had told him to stay at the castle while the Lancer dealt with Serendipity's disappearance, and the Archer Gil had also suggested they ought to wait until—

Merlin materialized next to Diarmuid. "My my my," he said vaguely and a little too loudly.

After that, without even glancing around, he strode over to Jekyll, grabbed him by the arm, and yanked out a few strands of the Assassin's blond hair. Lilac light pulsed around them and there was a flurry of movement too fast to track. Then Jekyll sprang away from Merlin, landing in a feral crouch.

Merlin, a pearly sheen outlining his form, was unmoved by whatever had occurred. He held out his palm toward Jekyll, with a handful of tiny things glinting in his palm, and said, his voice serene, "Finders keepers, Hyde?"

Diarmuid blinked, looking more closely at the crouched form. His eyes seemed green from where Diarmuid stood, and his build remained slight, but the body language was definitely not the doctor's usual, even over the past two days. Perhaps it was some sort of inbetween state.

Slowly Jekyll (or possibly Hyde) stood up, tugging off one of his gloves. Then he moved close enough to snatch the rings from Merlin's palm. As he placed one over each finger, he said, "You can bet if I find her, I'm keeping her, Petals."

Merlin smiled, a broad, strange expression in the situation. "Just what I wanted to hear." He whirled away, looking toward Diarmuid and Tora, and murmured, "Let me just catch up."

His gaze went distant for a long moment. While he was distracted, Hyde circled him, watching him like a cat stalking a bird. It made Diarmuid uncomfortable enough that he started forward to wrangle the Berserker.

Then Hyde held up a hand toward Diarmuid and said, in a voice eerily like Jekyll's, "No, no, I'm fine. Just stretching my legs. I've been so busy after all, sitting here doing nothing while Master is gone, stolen by somebody and nobody is finding her—" He coughed. "I'm fine. Stretching my legs. What are you doing, Petals?" Suddenly he was spinning a knife in one hand.