FFD 69 Pre Beta

AAAAAND... IT'S ALMOST DONE!!!

Yeah. Despite all my procra-er, dedicated work, the fight has only just reached it's grand finale. I'm cutting it off here so that I can pace it and have the grand finale all to itself. Sorry for yet another cliffhanger. I seriously didn't mean for it to turn out this way this time.

And yes, I pulled a new heavy hitting character completely out of my ass for this one. I was planning on Fina's First Mate being an absolute monster of a unit, but I couldn't decide on a final design up until just before writing this chapter. All in all, I'm pretty happy with the way Jericho turned out with her design and position inside the crew, and the way her powers absolutely screw with the standard status quo.

A few more details about Jericho: She constantly puts Fina on guard by staging mutinies every couple of months. She was originally turned by Rita Rozay-en, but escaped her control with Altrouge's help and is the reason why Fina met Alt in the first place. She has an Earth Element, and was a third generation magus from an upper middle class Muslim family in what was Syria that studied desalinization magecraft to survive on the desert coast of the Mediterranean, but due to nobility and some political assholes wanting her family property because of all the water they had, she was left as the only survivor, leaving her with a strong dislike for nobility and the upper class.

The scar on her head was made two centuries ago during a fight between Fina and Strout during a particularly heated argument. Her Salt Magecraft pulls and restructures salt from her surroundings into condensed crystals that are as sharp and hard as steel, but reinforced by magecraft utilizing the belief that salt had purifying and permanent properties, making it stronger than diamond and giving it purification properties, making her particularly powerful and effective against other Apostles and magi. Especially within the main body.

Had Shirou not locked Fina in his own body and kept him on land, the fight would have turned out far differently, and Shirou would likely have lost once Jericho appeared. He can't handle fighting both of them at once within the main body.

Inside the main body, Jericho has access to an absurd well of stamina and mana, making her near impossible to take down in a battle of endurance, and if it was one on one, she is actually stronger than Fina. The reason why she submits to him is because he is better at being a "captain" than she is, and he is more suited to serving as the foundation of the "eighth". If Fina ever died, and Jericho became the captain, the entity that is known as the "Eighth" would become "A greater disaster, but a lesser threat against humanity overall".