[Hereafter] Chapter VIII: Sangraal (Patreon)

Now, after that heaping helping of news that probably isn't so welcome, let me drop something more to your palate on you.

The fight in this chapter was a bit awkward to write. It's relatively short and not super interesting, but that's the problem with writing Servant battles: since Servants move so quickly and with such force, the only way to spice them up is to make the viewpoint character in awe of what's going on or adding some kind of urgency to the battle.

Taylor has fought Scion. She's fought Endbringers. She's fought all sorts of superhuman enemies. Taylor is not overly impressed with Servants' physical capabilities.

There's also no real rush. The battle doesn't have to end as quickly as possible for a lot of different reasons, and if I'd tried to impose the limit of, "Taylor only has so much magical energy," well, one, loads of mediocre Masters have managed to support Servants a lot more costly than Cu for far more intense combat. Two, that would kind of mean fighting Saber afterwards was immediately out, which would bloat Singularity F by making the team retreat to the Tohsaka house for another day. 

In the end, this battle was not the most interesting one in this story, and it was never meant to be. This is the tutorial level, after all, and although I've tried to spice things up a little to make it feel more like "this is definitely an experience that matches the intensity of some of the other main Singularities," there's a limit to what I can do with that.

I hope you enjoy the rest of the chapter anyway. I really do find the character interactions the best parts of this story to begin with, because they're so much fun to play off each other.

Also, I'm not sure if you guys have noticed, but I've been trying to inject a little bit of realism into the story. For example, a couple of "just graduated high school" teenagers and a "I don't really exercise regularly, but I can use magecraft to boost my performance" administrator aren't going to have an easy time climbing all of those stairs in one go, even though they apparently do in FGO canon.