Chapter Text
Marcus stood up and dashed for the knife, grabbing it he brandished it at the woman in an amateurish attempt at intimidation.
“ Who the fuck are you?” He asked, sweat dripping in thick beads down his forehead. The woman seemed confused.
“ I am your servant.” she said as if it was common knowledge.
“ What the hell are you talking about?” He asked as he slowly backed towards the door.
“ I am your servant.” She repeated. “ A spirit of great power summoned by the Grail to fight alongside you in this war.” Marcus gained the impression that this was something that this was something she was proud of.
“ What war?” He asked, feeling the woman's eyes burn a hole through him from behind her blindfold. “ We’re in Michigan! I…” Marcus’s foot struck the dead man’s. “ Fuck.” he quietly muttered. For some fucking reason he checked the man’s pulse and found it expectantly silent. His finger came back from the man’s throat red. He caught the vomit in his throat and forced it back down. “ Holy shit you actually killed him.” The woman looked at him as if he was insane.
“ I took you this long to figure that out?” Marcus made a break for the door, leaping over the body he dashed out the remnants of the door frame and sprinted through the warehouse. His eyes darted from side to side. In a miracle of work safety regulations the building was devoid of security cameras. As Marcus passed through the same door he entered he saw the woman standing in the parking lot. Her bow was gone now and her flowing clothes waved softly in the cold wind. Beyond her sat Marcus’s motorcycle.
“ What do you want from me?” Marcus yelled across the asphalt expanse. The woman sighed.
“ In most situations one would express their gratitude to the person who saved their life instead of running away from them. You’re being very rude right now master.
“ Stop it with the masters, please.” Marcus begged. “ You’re making this so much worse for me right now.”
“ Making what worse?” The woman asked innocently
“ I don’t even know anymore! I come back to Hendring once and I immediately get jumped by a fucking wizard who gets shot with a bow by some chick who won’t stop calling me master. “
“ I can stop calling you master if you wish.”
“ Thank you.” Marcus said exasperatedly. “ You don’t know how much that helps the situation.” The woman seemed to perk up for a second as if she felt some rustling in the distance.
“ That building’s about to explode, you should walk away from it.”
“ What?” In the blink of an eye the woman dashed several hundred feet forward, swept Marcus off his feet, put him in a bridal carry, and leapt into the air, the woman’s back towards the building. As they flew through the air Marcus felt those eyes behind the fabric pierce through him again, not violently as before but carefully, scientifically as if she was trying to peel back the skin of Marcus and examine the white hot core within him. The adrenaline pumping through Marcus’s veins demanded that he make some form of protest against this woman, to scream and kick and gnaw against whatever she was and whatever she wanted but something inside him stopped him, choked his protests in his throat and stopped his writhing before the neurons ever gave the order. So he sat in the arms of a murderer, his mouth opened as if speech could come at any moment, his face painted with fear and confusion and intrigue. The woman spoke first.
“ Cover your ears and open your mouth.” A deafening boom came from behind them, then a wave of heat as if an enormous hot oven had just been opened and then millions of tiny shards of debris sent flying through the air. The pair hit the ground, shards of the building pattering against the black pavement. The woman let go of Marcus who found his knees weak and wobbly as they met the ground. He raised his head to see the warehouse engulfed in a monstrous fire ball.
“ How did you know?” he asked quietly.
“ The man’s mana levels began to skyrocket the second after I killed him, far beyond anything that could be considered normal.”
“ Holy shit they sent a suicide bomber after me.” He looked at the woman. “ We need to go.”
“ You wish for me to come with you? Just a moment ago you seemed to think I was some kind of demon and fled from me in fear and terror and now you wish for me to come with you?” Marcus glanced around nervously as he walked towards his bike.
“ Look, I have no idea what’s going on and you seem like the only person I can actually work with right now, okay?” The woman chuckled softly and began to follow him.
“ Taking into account of your previous requests for me to stop referring to you as my master, what do you wish for me to call you?”
“ Marcus I guess,” he said as he mounted his bike. He checked the dials. All were back to normal. He suddenly decided that he should be thankful for the woman. He turned around to do so and saw a more pressing issue in the fact that he had no way of fitting two people on his bike.
“ Do not worry Marcus, I have a solution for this problem.” Instantly she vanished into complete nothingness. Marcus’s head swung around wildly, his eyes scoured the areas searching for the woman. The woman popped back into existence directly ahead of Marcus.
“ What the hell was that!”
“ It is known as spirit mode, it allows us servants to assume a purely spiritual form temporarily.” Marcus nodded, pretending to know what that would actually entail and kicked off as the woman spontaneously vanished again. The bike stuttered and coughed down the road a bit before Marcus began to speak.
“ Hey, can you hear me?” Marcus asked the air quietly.
“ Yes.” came the woman's voice, as serious and melodic as ever before.
“ Do you have a name?” He asked as he rolled past a strip mall abandoned except for a sketchy looking smoke shop with several far too young lingering outside. “ I’ve only ever heard you refer to yourself as a servant.”
“ I do.” she said. “ Though you need not know it. Call me Archer.” Marcus nodded.
“ When we were in the warehouse you said that you were summoned for a war. Do you mind explaining that to me?”
“ Certainly.” Again Marcus felt the barely contained pride.” The Holy Grail War is a battle to the death between seven mages and their seven servants to gain the Holy Grail, a vessel said to be able to grant any wish. Each servant is part of a class, mine is archer but there are more.”
“ How many more?”
“ Somewhere between 7 and 19.”
“ Great.” Marcus rolled to a stop at a traffic light and let a middle aged man jog across the sidewalk. As soon as he passed he began to speak again. “ Is there a way out?”
“ None that are built into the system itself. There may be some external rituals that could be performed but the summoning has only provided me the most basic information about this as possible.” Marcus turned into the parking lot of a small motel. High above the two story building stretched a towering sign that was likely once considered neon before the bulbs burned out and left the brightly painted logo of Bill’s Dirt Cheap Motel ( now with color television!) in darkness. He turned off the motorcycle and let the kick stand hold the bike up. He hiked his hands up his pockets to hide the glow and whispered something in broken Latin as he touched his forehead to the bike.
“ What is it that you are doing, Marcus?” asked the disembodied voice of Archer.
“ Casting a curse on my bike.” he said rather casually as he opened the door to the motel’s lobby. Behind a deep brown vinyl wooden desk sat a heavy set old woman with dyed brown hair and a pair of thin horned reading glasses. A cigarette sat between her lips. Marcus stepped towards her, inhaling the scent of the tobacco. The woman looked up from her copy of People.
“ What do you want?” she croaked.
“ Get me a room for 2.” Marcus asked as he reached into his pocket. His fingers found a dollar bill and with the glow of teal light, it became a hundred dollar bill. He slapped it down off the desk and the woman hastily took it and more reluctantly handed him a key. Marcus quickly walked away, hoping that the spell wouldn’t wear off.
He strolled down the long carpeted porch, brushing his hands against the chipped white rails occasionally until he reached room 214. He turned the key and stepped inside. It was a small poorly lit room. 2 beds with off white sheets sat pressed against the wall, a small tube tv sitting on a table in front of them. The walls were white but the glow from the light bulb seemed to paint the whole room a deep, deep yellow. Archer manifested suddenly atop one of the beds and laid down, stretching her arms as if it was the most comfortable bed she had ever been in. Marcus walked to the bathroom, a small white tiled room with a cramped shower and a chipped white porcelain sink underneath a grimy mirror and across from a strangely small toilet. He realized now how bad he smelled and decided for the good of the nation he would take a shower. But he felt his shirt brush against something as he pulled it off his torso. He turned his back to the mirror and looked over his shoulder into the mirror. In it he saw a version of him with a massive black magic circle that covered his back, stretching from his shoulders to his waist to his hips. He grabbed a towel and began frantically scrubbing at it only for it to remain there, unchanged.
“ Fuck.”