The Harrowing Assassin

"Reflections are...honest. They are vengeful... And sometimes, they are...sovereign."

- The Harrowing Assassin.

Harrowing Assassin (悲惨なアサシン) is the Assassin-class Servant summoned by Walter Wayneright to participate in the Magician's Theater of the Vodnyisad War once his brother is defeated. An Assassin that could never be summoned under ordinary circumstances, he is a phenomenon of the Mirrored World.

Identity
Assassin's identity is The Reflection of Hassan (ハッサンの反映), The Shadow of the Mountain. Due to the nature of Hassan-ih-Sabbah as a composite identity rationalized through the logic of the Holy Grail, the nineteen faces of Hassan-ih-Sabbah all cast the same reflection within the Mirrored World. Though he was actualized the instant that the Mirrored World came into existence, he has appeared within its artificial history sporadically for some eighty years. At the start of the Vodnyisad War, when the Holy Grail attempts to access the template for the Assassin class, he imposes his own identity upon the system and assumes its role. Due to the nature of the Mirrored World he was able to survive without a Master for several weeks before selecting Walter Wayneright as a partner.

While The Dreaming Stranger is an incomprehensible entity who does not possess a reflection, The Reflection of Hassan is solely a phenomenon of the Mirrored World, and only truly exists as a part of the mirror. Despite this, Stranger was unaware of his presence until he manifested in the same room as her and attempted to kill her. She compares him to a force of nature, stating that he closer resembles a natural disaster than a living being, and therefore considers him a remarkable existence because the Mirrored World lacks the influences of Gaia or the presence of the Counter Force.

Appearances
Assassin appears as a tall, lanky man in the battered garb of an Englishman of the eighteenth century. Apparently dressed for a masquerade, he wears a battered tailcoat and tophat, his face covered with the beaked mask of a plague doctor. Oddly enough his legs and arms are wrapped in heavy belts and draped with metal trinkets engraved in lost and chthonic languages. Fashioned after the image of serial killers that appeared in penny dreadfuls and old wives' tales, his apocryphal and illogical appearance is meant to cast inhuman shadows and announce the arrival of a murderer; unlike typical members of his class who wish to remain unseen, The Harrowing Assassin thrives on the terror inspired in a victim who knows that he is coming and can do nothing to stop it.

Personality
Assassin is a calm, implacable figure modeled in the likeness of a brilliant nemesis - a contemplative genius with an obsessive personality masked by reserve and the guise of a plague doctor. He is not emotionless, nor does he display the rigorous discipline inherent to the members of his class, but is described by The Dreaming Stranger as an artist who became willingly consumed by his art. He is aware that his identity and past are fabrications of the Mirrored World, and that his personality is largely one-dimensional as he fills the role of a construct, but these facts do not appear to trouble him. Prior to their battle, he suggests to The Dreaming Stranger that the world outside of the Mirrored World is a "true hell", if humanity is so hopelessly incompetent that the Mirrored World has to exist in the first place.

His relationship with his Master is professional, and neither of them interact with one another more than is necessary. Notably, Assassin refers to Walter Wayneright as a murderer, and questions the purposes of killing for money or political gain. He has no interest in the Grail War itself, and only seems to go along with Walter's plans because of a desire to compete against The Dreaming Stranger and, to a lesser extent, The Sleeping Jester. It is revealed that he has an obsession with individuals he deems to be intellectual rivals in some capacity, and focuses on The Dreaming Stranger for her knowledge of the Mirrored World and The Sleeping Jester for her ability to unravel any mystery given enough time. When he is defeated, he admits that the person he hates the most is Hassan-ih-Sabbah, calling him "too weak to be crowned the King of Executioners".

Development
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Seventh Overture
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Data Records Unearthed
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Welcome to Arcadia
The Harrowing Assassin appears as a part of Cheska Kamui's hallucination when she is attacked by The Red Witch. He ruminates on the memories of those who die in the Mirrored World and are slowly forgotten outside of it before Cheska destroys his image with The Flames of the Fatima.

Abilities
An unparalleled murderer who represents the reflection of Hassan-i-Sabbah, who possesses many forms but only casts one reflection, he is an existence that can only manifest inside the Mirrored World, parallel to the world of the Holy Grail. Due to the nature of his existence, he simultaneously emulates the skills of all nineteen faces of Hassan-i-Sabbah, though he lacks the individual lifetimes of experience and instead reproduces these talents via mimicry. Unlike many of the other Assassins, he does not demonstrate proclivity towards ranged or subversive techniques, and fights at close range with an enormous serrated knife. He possesses the wiry, long limbs true to the other members of his class and is exceptionally quick and acrobatic, and his fighting style is frenzied as he constantly shifts around an opponent while swinging at their vitals.

Watching countless crimes from the other sides of washroom and bedroom mirrors, Assassin possesses an intimate fascination with the act of violent murder, having witnessed killing throughout the centuries and seen the clandestine ways that ordinary people commit terrible acts behind closed doors. Enamored with the ideal of artful killing, Assassin derived a delusional formula for his "art" that the world rationalizes as a perverse form of ritual sacrifice. Killing and displaying his victims in this spectacular manner, Assassin is capable of eroding away the humanity of a civilization, driving people to desperate acts of violence as if consumed by animal passion and psychosis. The prana he gains from consuming the lifeforce of humans in this manner is exponentially greater than that of other Servants, and should he manage to slay an exceptional lifeform on par with a Servant, the return from the ritual is great enough to permanently increase his own abilities.

Assassin's greatest power and the core of his abilities, however, is that enabled by his Noble Phantasm: Mirror Fantasia. Capable of diving into mirrors and manipulating the boundaries between this world and the one inside the mirror, Assassin can freely choose to exempt himself from conditions in this world as if existing in another dimension entirely while at the same time affecting persons and objects in this world by acting upon their reflections. Shattering the mirror only increases the danger of this ability, as each of the shards now qualifies as a mirror for whatever they are facing. It is also possible for Assassin to simply plunge his arm into the surface of a mirror to stab or grasp at objects in the reflection, but he cannot perform actions that do not include directly touching the mirror; for example, he cannot simply throw his knife into the mirror to kill someone's reflection, as objects cannot pass through worlds if his body is not connected to them in some way.

He possesses a very keen awareness for battlefield conditions and his surroundings, and when fighting against The Dreaming Stranger and her Master, was able to keep track of a bullet's reflection across a hallway containing hundreds of mirrors and simultaneously reorient them all so that the bullet would strike her Master's reflection. It is noted by The Sleeping Jester that in an ordinary war, Assassin would have thinned the ranks of the Masters to just a few survivors within the first twenty-four hours. Because he was summoned late and tasked with fighting blindly against Stranger, the one individual in the whole of the Throne of Heroes with whom he is most incompatible, however, he was unable to enact his plan of massacre.

Skills
Presence Concealment: A

The ability to erase oneself from the world while moving through fields of detection that goes beyond simply remaining unseen. So long as it is theoretically possible for something to remain hidden in an area under extraordinary circumstances, Servants with this level of skill will be able to do so. It is possible for Assassin to distort his location while attacking, and so long as he remains mobile, it is almost impossible to predict his movements.

Disengage: B

The ability to successfully break away from combat through agility and knowledge of how to shake pursuers. Greater degrees of this skill make it possible for the conditions of battle to be reset as if the user had not fought at all. So long as escape is possible, one with this level of skill will have a substantial chance to successfully do so even against powerful opponents.

Expert of Many Specializations: D

Capacity to access and utilize many different skills at a professional level, whereas an ordinary person is only able to cultivate a handful of talents during their lifetime. Manifested as experience rather than knowledge, some degree of skill can be maintained even with an inferior mental state to that possessed in life. As the Reflection of Hassan-i-Sabbah, Assassin does not technically possess the experience of the original, and instead possesses inferior versions of the hundreds of skills possessed by members of the Assassin class.

Hypersensitive: D

Amplification of one's sensory perception and inputs to extraordinary degrees, permitting instantaneous reactions independent of thought. Attributes such as vision and hearing are greatly increased, and it is possible to identify the number of persons and their body types purely through vibrations in the ground. At this level, reflexes can be said to be sufficient to indentify and respond to suprise attacks, even if the Servant cannot see the attacker or identify the nature of the attack itself.

Signature Kill: D+

Obsession with a unique fashion of killing that generates chaotic thoughts and impulses in society as the murders become known. A fashion of killing that can be called a perverse form of art, it qualifies as ritualistic practice for the one who possesses this skill, and is a form of self-hypnotism providing augmentation on the level of legitimate magic. Murders committed in this fashion instantly replenish Assassin's prana, and killing many humans or exceptional individuals results in a single rank-up to one of his parameters.

Tremor: C

The projected aura of wrongness and incompatability with reason and logic that precedes the arrival of a "monster". One who demonstrates this presence erodes the human nature and influences of civilization around themselves, preventing Servants from drawing upon fame or powers derived from humanity or the planet by obscurring them with a dense, mental fog. At this level, it is impossible to pierce the fog without skills that specifically combat mental interference.

Noble Phantasms
Assassin like the majority of his class possesses only one Noble Phantasm, reflecting the ideal of an assassin posssessing one particular method of killing that best exemplifies them. Mirror Fantasia: Paradise in the Looking Glass is the technique possessed by The Harrowing Assassin when he is summoned in the Vodnyisad War. It is the eyes of Assassin that can see both the reality of Gaia and that of the Mirrored World at the same time, that which should be impossible under the laws set forth by the planet. It distorts his mind with the constant awareness of both worlds and creates an image in his mind where space is standardized between both worlds, allowing him to enter reflective surfaces and interact with the images within as if there was simply another room behind the door formed by the frame of the mirror. It is not a true awareness of the Mirrored World, but as The Dreaming Stranger suggests, a delusional fantasy that happens to overlap with the truth.

Within the world formed by the mirror, Assassin's constant awareness of both worlds allows him to shift the boundaries between the reflected objects and their originals, creating dual-existences that can be harmed in Mirrored World to affect the original. Because of his tremendous speed and specialization in melee combat, even if an opponent is aware of Assassin's Noble Phantasm, he can utilize the unfamiliarity of commanding one's reflection to bypass their natural combat abilities, often jumping between dozens of mirrors to continuously exploit their blind spots. Combat training is reduced to almost nothing against this ability, since even one weakness will be multiplied by a thousand through enough mirrors. The only reasonable defense is to simply be able to drown out the connection between worlds with enormous magical power.

Due to the nature of his Noble Phantasm, while Assassin cannot appear both in the real world and the Mirrored World at the same time, he is capable of manipulating the worlds inside hundreds of mirrors simultaneously so long as he can see them. A tangential phenomenon that cannot be said to be magic, it is akin to a magician's parlor trick being made into reality, and something that actual sorcerers cannot comprehend. A magic-user can be defeated almost instantaneously by rationalizing a spell they throw at him as occurring a hundred times over and then imposing the cost onto them, or by redirecting an attack inside a mirror and then shifting hundreds of other mirrors to show the altered reflection, rather than the real image. Because he can freely dive into mirrors to avoid even unstoppable abilities, he is considered a supreme Assassin capable of engaging in legitimate combat, unlike any real Hassan.

The prana cost for this ability varies based on the scale of use, and in order to rationalize many reflections, Assassin would have to utilize his Signature Kill skill on many humans beforehand.