“…Though I say that, no child would hate a fairy tale with a hero in it, would they? It could be used to give you dreams, like cheap wine. Haha, it might not even be that bad to live like your mentor.”

A new wave of red sand was about to be sent toward us from the wings of the divine bird. The knight stood in front of us, blocking its way.

“—Begin simulation(TN: Actually it’s the same word used in Mash’s Noble Phantasm! So I guess it could also be ‘pseudo-deployment’?).”

He raised his right hand. Though his movements were light, I could feel a dense concentration of Magical Energy there.

“Noble Phantasm, set. Ah, I’ll ignore the precise parameters. I’m not even a Heroic Spirit, just someone imitating Galahad.”

It was the knight(Sir Kay)’s Noble Phantasm.

He drew a circle with his fingers, and a strange white mist appeared in the middle of the desert of red sand.

Perhaps it was a Noble Phantasm that was meant to originate from water. However, it was only a simulation. It wasn’t possible for someone like Sir Kay, who wasn’t a Servant, to create even the hypothetical construct of a Noble Phantasm. Servants were simply too special.

If he wanted to force himself to do so, not only would he not succeed, he would also die.

“Sir Kay…!”

“Don’t worry about me.”

For the first time.

For the first time, only for a moment, I saw his face. That was probably because of the large concentration of Magical Energy that he had gathered for the simulation of a Noble Phantasm.

It was a face that looked slightly troubled, yet carried a smile that looked like it belonged to someone with a terrible personality.

That probably wasn’t what the knight was supposed to look like. Just like what he said about how the Husk King wasn’t the true King Arthur, that appearance was a mixture of Add and his original face.

Even so, or perhaps, because of that very reason, to me, it was…

“Trust me, it’ll be fine, Idiot Gray.”

Feathers of sand shot from the wings of the divine bird. The knight, who had been looking at me, turned to face the bombardment and shouted.

“Deploying Pseudo Noble Phantasm— Camelot Image(the Ephemeral Yet Unforgettable Castle)!(TN: Absolutely butchering the rest of that name, but oh well. It’s 儚くも忘れじの城, in case anyone wanted to know)”

Was that the fortress itself?

A Camelot made of mist rose up around the knight. It was that beautiful castle of chalk, praised by bards and poets from ancient times to the present. That castle, where it was said that as long as the famous Knights of the Round Table were gathered, no invaders or monsters would ever be able to enter.

Ah, I had thought that not even a hypothetical construct could be created. That even if he had managed to unleash it, by some miracle, it would only cause his death.

Just then, the knight had proved that it was possible.

However.

As if trying to say that even miracles like this were fakes, the feathers of the divine bird(Hermes) still fell upon us.

It was as if it was a castle made of glass.

For a few seconds, the walls blocked the attack, but they were quickly shattered.

“Damn it! But it was nice to see. I’ve already grown sick of looking at that beautiful castle!”

The bombardment enveloped the knight and his laughter.

His figure disappeared in the flurry of dust.

The divine bird(Hermes) chirped loudly, as if it was celebrating its own victory.

However, something else appeared from the dust, just as it prepared to spread its wings for another attack. (TN: Yeah these are all one-sentence paragraphs)

Something struck the divine bird(Hermes) with an incredible amount of force.

It was one of the bird’s own feathers of sand.

“—!”

I raised my had to block the shockwave of the explosion, and understood what had happened.

The castle of mist did not protect the knight’s body at all. That had never been the plan. The castle that he said he had long since grown tired of looking at did not have the ability to do that. However, it absorbed some of the divine bird(Hermes)’s feathers and shot them back at it, like a trick shot.

Of course, the attack from the divine bird(Hermes) was effective. The superweapon was now falling from the sky, being dragged by gravity toward the earth.

…It was as if that weak knight, who had never properly won a battle, had never lost to anything, whether it was another knight, or a monster.

As if that was the embodiment of his life.

“Sir Kay!”

There was no response.

The sharp-tongued knight disappeared without a trace, as if he had been an error from the very beginning. I should have expected that. Even if he hadn’t taken the full force of the attack, imitating a Noble Phantasm as a non-Servant was enough to destroy his Spirit Origin(TN: Alternatively, Saint Graph).

Lord El=Melloi II's Case Files: The Atlas Contract (Upper); Chapter 5, Part 4