Summary
Servants are spirits summoned by the Holy Grail to compete under Masters in the Holy Grail War. Typically, they are Heroic Spirits, beings of a higher existence given to them by the people's ideals of them, but can also be Divine Spirits, Phantoms, Wraiths, and even normal humans, in extreme circumstances.
Masters never summon the actual Heroic Spirit itself, and even to the Holy Grail or Counter Force, summoning of an actual Heroic Spirit is impossible. Only the World can directly summon the actual Heroic Spirits, and the occurrence of such is extremely rare.
When summoned by the Grail, instead of summoning the actual spirit, the Greater Grail instead records the information about the Heroic Spirits that is available from the throne, and then creates a copy of that information and forces it into the form of a Servant. In this way the Servants that are summoned are much closer to a shadow of an actual Heroic Spirit, as they are not actually the proper spirit, but a copy of that spirit based off of the information the Greater Grail has gleaned from the Throne of Heroes.
Uses
Here are the basic abilities a character can get by being a Servant.
- Minor Reality Warping via Supernatural Luck: Luck can not only change the user's fate, but also reality[1]
- Enhanced Senses: Servants have extremely good senses, being able to sense other Servants even when they are out of sight. They can also detect radiation, killer viruses and other microscopic dangers and can see even in complete darkness.[2]
- Immortality (Types 1, 7 and 9): As seen in Saber Wars II event, Servants cease aging once they have hit their physical peak. Also, a Heroic Spirit's true form is held in the Throne of Heroes and Servants are merely their copies (a ghost of their late forms, essentially) thus a Servant's death will do nothing to them, though this isn't combat applicable.
- Inorganic Physiology (Type 1): Servants' minds and bodies are composed of Spiritron and Ether, thus making their bodies extremely difficult to damage.
- Extrasensory Perception: Servants normally can sense souls even when they are very far away. They can also sense the emotions of others directed towards them.
- Soul Manipulation, Conceptual Manipulation, Information Manipulation, Limited Mind Manipulation and Memory Manipulation: A Servants main sustenance is mana, but they can consume souls to maintain themselves into the world. Servants can also perform spiritual attacks that can cleave souls, and even reverse possession from Divine Spirits when their resistance is down. Not only do souls contain the concepts and information of a being, but also have their mind and memories within[3], which, alongside the body, protect the soul and stop it from being reached.[4]
- Absorption and Information Analysis: Besides souls, a Servant may rely on consuming the essence of Shadow Servants, who are made of residual magical energy that have coalesced into the form of a fake Servant. Servants can gain information from those their absorbs.
- Limited Sound Manipulation: Servants vocal cords are extremely powerful, capable of creating screams that can be heard throughout the entirety of a Roman Army.
- Possession: Servants appear into the world by possessing a body or a vessel.
- Intangibility and Invisibility: By entering Spirit Form, Servants can become invisible and intangible even to other Servants.
- Non-Physical Interaction: Servants are shown to be able to affect wandering souls and ghosts. They are also shown to be able to affect conceptually and have type 4 acausality non-existent body of Kama. Can also affect higher dimensional existences, such as demons.
- Regeneration (Mid-Low; Low-Mid over time): All Servants have low-level regenerative abilities that allow them to easily heal cuts and wounds. Servants can continue fighting even with a hole through their gut and can regenerate unless their head/heart is destroyed, or they run out of mana.
- Invulnerability: Servants are Divine Mysteries that cannot be harmed by modern weapons such as guns, knives, or bombs unless they are infused with a supernatural aspect such as magical energy or possess a certain amount of age.
- Self-Sustenance (Types 1, 2 and 3): Servants are unaffected by a lack of oxygen and freely move in outer space as seen in Saber Wars and Ooku. Servants don't need food, only magical energy, and they don't starve to death, only dying when there isn't enough magical energy to keep their bodies intact. Servants also don't need sleep and can fight 24/7 as long as they are backed up by Mana.
- Acrobatics: Servants are shown across multiple medias to have insane acrobatics skills, with even someone like Ganesha being able to do a 720° backflip mid-air.
- Water Walking and Energy Manipulation: Experienced Servants can manipulate their magical energy to walk on water. Can also manipulate the magical energy on their feet to gain a firm standing on even a moving plane.
- Aura: Powerful servants possess an aura, causing anyone in their presence to be overwhelmed by a crushing pressure that immobilizes weaker opponents.
- Rage Power: Servants may undergo an Ascension through strong emotions such as anger. Ascensions are said to be a boost to a Servant's power by bringing them closer to their "starting point of conception".
- Power Nullification: Servants are Divine Mysteries, and thus any spell directed at them is nullified as long as it doesn't have enough Mystery.
- Spatial Manipulation, Law Manipulation, Regeneration and Immortality (Type 4) Negation Via Causality Negation: Conceptual weapons are able to attack concepts, natural providence, and space as well nullifying said concepts like Immortality by overwriting them
Resistances
Here are the basic resistances a character can get by being a Servant.
- Resistance to Empathic Manipulation: Kiara's existence passively induces an unreasonable need to love her in those who know her, whereas Servants and Spiritron Hackers are unaffected by her presence.
- Madness Manipulation (Type 3): Servants are not affected by the madness of the Suiten Palace as well as Tenma Musashi's aura that causes ordinary people to go mad.[5]
- Status Effect Inducement and Paralysis Inducement: Servants can escape low ranked Bounded Fields without any physical effort, which is already enough to weigh down the 100-150 ton Golden Hind.
- Poison Manipulation and Acid Manipulation: Servants can resist the powerful poisons of Jack the Ripper and Serenity, and they can move freely in streets filled with gaseous sulfuric acid in London.
- Corrosion Inducement: Servants can survive within the abyss, which was able to decay and rot objects.
- Soul Manipulation, Conceptual Manipulation and Information Manipulation: Just like any other characters in the Nasuverse, a Servant's body and mind protect their souls from harm. Furthermore, they can take hits directed to their Spirit Origins, the CPU of the soul to an extent. Souls are also higher dimensional information forms.[6]
- Extrasensory Perception and Enhanced Senses: By entering Spirit Form, Servants cannot be detected and sensed even to other Servants.
- Mind Manipulation, Biological Manipulation and Corruption (Types 1 & 2): Servants can resist Tiamat's Sea of Life to an extent. All those who enter her Sea of Life are subject to a geas on the cellular level that also corrupts any spirit origin and makes them her minions and enemies of humanity.
- Life Manipulation and Death Manipulation: Servants aren't alive and aren't considered lifeforms, and because they're just ether in the form of past individuals and not true life, they can survive Surtr's Noble Phantasm, Loptr Laegjarn, which has a "preferential right" against all life, instantly killing whatever it hits, even Gods from the Age of Gods. Furthermore, they can see Osakabehime normally, who induces instant death with her presence.
- Transmutation and Data Manipulation: Servants can stay in digitized area in SE.RA.PH longer than humans, whereas if a person stays long enough they are turned into data.
- Absorption: Shown in Stay Night and Extella Link that Servants usually resist the effects of Blood Fort Andromeda, which breaks down everyone in the range into a bloody slurry, releasing their magical energy, and then absorbs it, only suffering a reduction in statistics instead.
- Heat Manipulation: Servants can take heat from lava and cold from a gas giant that freezes sound with minimal discomfort.
- Overwhelming Aura and Explosion Manipulation: Servants are capable of living in Age of Gods, when the mana's properties are different, making normal humans explode instantly.
- Fear Manipulation: Can fight against the Heroic Spirit Swordmasters with no trouble, despite their fear aura.
- Sense Manipulation, Perception Manipulation, Memory Manipulation, Madness Manipulation (Type 2) and Illusion Creation: Servants would have been unaffected by the Bounded Field inside Salem if not for it's divine power. The Bounded Field weakens and messes with the senses, awareness and memories of anyone inside and drives them insane, causing auditory and visual hallucinations.
- Existence Erasure: Heroic Spirits can survive within the Far Side of the Moon without being erased as long as they stay awake. They can also survive hits from Altera's attacks that shave off pieces of existence.
- Void Manipulation and Physics Manipulation: Servants can survive within the Imaginary Number Space, which is described as a Void Space, capable of erasing time, space, existence, data and information. The Imaginary Number Space and Real Space have different physical laws, an unobservable territory, which is not even detectable by the currently existing laws of physics. Servant's Noble Phantasm is free from the laws of physics.
- Petrification: Servants are capable of resisting and canceling Medusa's Mystic Eyes of Petrification using their magical energy.
- Magecraft: Servants, just like Phantasmal Beasts and Dead Apostles, have innate resistance to Magecraft due to having Mystery. Due to Magecraft's nature as magical energy from the soul given form, and the Soul's nature as a higher dimensional form, the resistances and effects listed thereof are at least 4 dimensional in nature, although it should be noted that physical phenomena attacks, like Elemental Manipulation, do not work like that, as they are not spiritual or metaphysical in nature. These effects include:
- Law Manipulation: Conceptual Magecraft is ineffective against Servants with Rank B Magic Resistance and they are capable of completely canceling it. Authorities are considered to act akin to a type of conceptual Magecraft.
- Spatial Manipulation and Time Manipulation: Servants with Rank D Magic Resistance can cancel a bubble of frozen space. Violet's Crack Ice Id_es which stops both time and space is stated to be resisted through Rank C Magic Resistance. Servants can also survive hits from Altera's attack that sheared a whole dimension away from existence. Should be resistant to modern Magecraft, including the one used by the Emiya family to speed up or slow down time or place objects in stasis.
- Time Stop: Able to function within a sea of Imaginary Number Space where the flow of time is halted. Able to fight and train in environments where time is stopped.
- Telepathy: Can block attempts to read their mind.
- Power Nullification: Via resistance to Counter Magic and other magical effects.
- Matter Manipulation and Body Puppetry: Due to resisting Alchemy, which deals with the manipulation of matter and bodies.
- Curse Manipulation: Due to resisting Witchcraft and various other curses.
- Holy Manipulation and Purification: Resistance to Baptism Rites.
- Sleep Manipulation: Due to resisting the many spells capable of putting others to sleep, such as those from Rin Tohsaka and Illyasviel von Einzbern.
- Social Influencing: Via resisting Suggestion, which implants subliminal messages on the brain.
- Elemental Manipulation, including Fire Manipulation, Water Manipulation, Earth Manipulation, Ice Manipulation, Air Manipulation and Electricity Manipulation: Via resisting common elemental attack spells.
- Chaos Manipulation
- Probability Manipulation: Via resisting misfortune spells, such as Cú's runes.
- Dream Manipulation: Via resisting dream interfering spells, such as those from Mephistopheles.
- Damage Transferal: Via resisting curses that redirect damage, such as those from Mephistopheles.
- Immersion: Via resisting imaginary number spells, which imprisons and skewers the target into a dimension of shadows, the Imaginary Number Space.
- Deconstruction: Can live in Imaginary Number Space for a while, which breaks down Ether beings into data to be stored elsewhere.
- Subjective Reality: Can survive Nothingness Magecraft, which take things that do not and cannot exist, and manifest them into reality.
- BFR and Higher-Dimensional Manipulation: Can resist Medea's teleportation.
- Size Manipulation, Sealing: Via resistance to Medea's Divine Punishment.
- Density Manipulation: Can resist Medea's density control.
- Fate Manipulation: Via resisting Archimedes's Time Lock.
- Gravity Manipulation: Via resisting many gravity control spells, such as Rin's.
References
Discussions
Discussion threads involving Servant Physiology |