"...Disappointing."

Why must everything and everyone deny her? All she'd even demanded this time was that her opponent fight her with his mightiest weapons. Instead a... clown? A clown was making some sort of speech calling her an idiot. Just like every other Servant she'd come across. 

"Disappointing, disappointing, disappointing."

She lets him speak. Every shake of her head is punctuated with another thrust of her sword into the body of Bohemond, until he is more stabs than man. It is not rage that drives this pointless violence. Her core is hollow, she cannot in this moment manage even a flicker of anger. There is simply nothing else for her to do just now, with her castle a smoking wreck and her army had been wiped off of the earth, more than half by her own hand. 

"I would blame this on your Christianity," she says after a long while of stabbing, "Except that Lancer fell victim to it too. I do not understand what it is about you children that makes you all so certain you are the lone arbiters of truth and strategic insight."

Lift, stab. Lift, stab. Lift, stab. Lift...

Bohemond lies dead. But despite the fact that he is a Servant, his body does not disappear. Rather, his magical energy does not return to the Sunshard that spawned him. He does not power the ritual. Rather, he is absorbed into the throne room and is made to power the gleaming machinery inside. Avenger cranes her neck to watch the ceiling, and sighs. 

Lift. Hold. Stab. The laser sword thrusts into one of the many slots carved into the landscape in here. Ghost-green lights flash along the length of the floor up to the throne, which rapidly unfolds into its component materials under the weight of the usurper suddenly sitting there. Assassin is more than quick enough to keep his feet, but shivering, feverish Angelesia is dumped onto the ground and left to tumble gracelessly down several stairs before she is caught by a quivering mass of cables.

Twist. Stomp. The nest pulls Angelesia tight and drags her down through the floor. She emerges wet and moaning at Avenger's feet, where a new seat has begun to assemble from blocks of raw material. It is not a throne this time. Cushions to absorb the shock of sudden g-forces, with joysticks at the end of both armrests stuck tight to her hands, belt after belt after belt snakes around Angelesia and straps her in inescapably tight. Her feet come to rest on a pair of pedals. The girl lurches violently, as though to throw up. Instead her head merely lolls as sweat drips from every pore in her body.

Avenger lifts her sword again and steps in front of the girl in the pilot's chair. She thrusts it deep into the walkway one more time and leans on it the way a knight might in some [i]other[/i] bygone age and land if they were inviting challenges for the crossing of a bridge, a world she had never known but had knowledge of anyway thanks to the magics of her summoning.

"Let me ask you now, lambs-son. Puppet of Actia. Do you feel clever now? Do you believe you are in charge here? Do you even understand what it is I [i]want?[/i]

The castle is dead. In the blinding glow of warning lights the last crumbling towers and walls all fall to dust. Only the core remains. The Keep, if you must be accurate. Only... not. From the dust, a massive clawed hand rises. It pulls a sword free from the rubble, blade crackling with dangerous energy in an outside replica of Avenger's own. A head like a helmet with a shining blue visor, black body of sleek armor plates and dangerous energy vents that extend like spikes from the joints, a coiled heat whip on its waist, and in its spare hand...

A great chunk of the primary weapon's tower lifts out from the ground with a plume of dust. A tower shield.

What had been a grand and empty throne room is now the much more cramped core of a second mecha standing against the Shrine Giant. Though it would be wrong to call it a cockpit. Between the sheer size of the monster and the general lack of need for real mechanical parts there proved to be an excess of empty (if reconfigured) space. More than enough for an army, and a painting, and a chimera. And of course, if it came to that, a battle.

"When you are hunting foxes," she growl-sighs, "It is first necessary to restrict their movements. Terror is more than a sword, did you say? Perhaps you are wiser than I gave you credit for."

Avenger leans backwards to plant a kiss on Angelesia's clammy lips. The hideous red cursemark, the fully gestated seed planted within her, burns bright against her chest.

"Darling Angelesia, my Queen-and-Pilot. I say to you once more: do not forget your gifts~"