The night had grown deep. A pale moon hung over the sky, and Fuyuki City had once again sunk into quiet.
The sea wind was cold in winter, and each Master had by now essentially completed their Servant summonings, entering the first night of the Holy Grail War.
Fuyuki City was not particularly large, especially now that seven ancient heroes had descended upon it. Not long into the night, a ripple of magical energy erupting from somewhere in the city made it clear that two Servants had already clashed in some form of testing combat.
The direction was toward Fuyuki's high school. The conflict was brief, less than a few minutes before silence returned. But that was enough, and every Master who had deployed familiars across the city confirmed the location within moments and began analyzing.
"The school? What's going on? Medea hasn't even been dealt with yet."
"And these people are already tearing into each other like this?"
In the Matou family villa, Matou Sakura frowned at the fresh intelligence in her hands.
The clash had been short, but the school building's rooftop and courtyard had been left pockmarked and cratered. Iron railings, platforms, and swaths of vegetation had been burned and melted away. The magical energy that had swept through there was enough to rattle even her familiars observing from a distance.
Powerful. Undeniably. Whichever two Servants had clashed there were genuinely terrifying.
Sakura had been feeling quietly satisfied with the Servant she had summoned. Now she felt a prickle of humility, because the magical energy from that brief clash was not significantly below what her own Servant could produce. And in a Holy Grail War, arrogance was the most unforgivable mistake. An unknown enemy could easily be stronger than anything you expected.
It also deepened her wariness of Medea. She had limited direct experience with Heroic Spirits and had never personally witnessed Medea's overwhelming power.
But if the Servants who had just clashed at the school were representative of the Fourth Holy Grail War's average level, then Medea, who had been one of the three absolute ceiling-breakers of that war, was probably even more frightening than Sakura had imagined. This wasn't defeatism. It was a rational inference based on incomplete information and the Holy Church's occasional habit of understating things.
"The real problem... is why Sister is over there."
This was what troubled Matou Sakura the most. Her surveillance familiars had picked up Tohsaka Rin in the area.
Which meant that during the clash at the school, one of the two combatants had a Master who was barely a half-rate mage, a woman whose magical ability was almost negligible but whose Bajiquan had inexplicably already surpassed even her senior, Kotomine Kirei. A mage with that profile had been standing directly in the combat zone.
"I need to bring her into the alliance quickly. As long as Medea remains unsolved, any internal fighting between the other Masters just hands that terrifying Servant an easy opportunity to profit while we bleed each other. Every probe and skirmish has to stop before things heat up for real."
Servants testing each other was perfectly normal. But it carried a real risk of escalating past a test.
The Fourth Holy Grail War had reportedly included a Servant who simply wanted to have a good time on the first night, only to end up in a conflict with five other Servants simultaneously, resulting in a top-tier opening hand being killed on the very first night by a five-on-one.
Sakura had no knowledge of the other Servants' true names or temperaments beyond what she knew about Medea. She couldn't guarantee that among these Servants there wasn't at least one with a short fuse and a serious case of middle-school delusions of grandeur.
"I'll make a pass by Sister's place first. At minimum, I need to confirm both sides' current combat strength."
But before she had finished working out her next move, another surge of magical energy hit her familiars' network, this one originating from the city's residential district.
"...?"
She felt it, paused for a second, and then suddenly seemed to realize something. She immediately threw on her coat, changed her shoes, and walked out.
Her familiars in the residential district had been positioned near someone she considered a rather promising upperclassman at school. His magical potential was notable, the sort that could improve the Matou bloodline, and since he had no parents, he was a potential candidate for future domestic arrangements. She had quietly designated him as Matou family property in advance, and she had no desire for him to have an accident during this Holy Grail War.
Well.
Designated property. That was all.
At least, that was what Matou Sakura told her family.
And now those familiars were reading a Servant-level magical energy signature from his location. She didn't know the specifics, but a bad premonition had already formed.
"Emiya? He's being attacked?"
Matou Shinji, who happened to be staying at an inn not far from Emiya Shirou's house, also noticed the anomaly. He had no magical familiars, but he had hidden cameras.
Through technology, he could track the city's oddities just as well as any proper mage.
"Tch. What a nuisance."
Handwritten characters appeared across the pages of his notebook.
Since the contract had been formed, his Heroic Spirit communicated exclusively this way.
Shinji couldn't access his Servant's stat values, but he could sense that the Presence Concealment skill was at an exceptional level, undetectable by magical or technological means alike.
"Go check on Emiya. If a Servant is present, record the weapons and abilities they use. I'll search the records afterward to identify their true name and weaknesses."
He wrote out the instructions in the notebook.
Then he checked his own gear and walked out of the cheap inn.
As for the intelligence Zouken had given him earlier, specifically that his friend Emiya Shirou had apparently become a mage, he hadn't thought much of it. He knew Shirou's personality well enough. It made no difference whether the person was male or female, human or otherwise, mage or civilian. As long as Shirou's character remained the same, he was still the one irreplaceable friend he had.
Besides, being a mage wasn't bad. This Holy Grail War was his to win. If Emiya Shirou was also a mage, pursuing the truth of magecraft alongside him would actually be a pleasant surprise.
Assuming, of course, that Shirou made it to the end and that their interests didn't conflict.
Because, as he had told his Assassin when forming their contract, it didn't matter who stood in his way. He would cut them down without hesitation.
"To think there's a Servant this unreasonably powerful..."
Tohsaka manor. The main residence.
His magical energy heavily depleted, minor wounds scattered across his body, his right wrist scorched faintly black, the man in red turned over the memory of the fight he'd just been in and furrowed his brow. It had been his first battle since being summoned, and it had been a fight where he was completely outmatched, only barely escaping because the enemy had apparently been testing him without full effort, and his own desperate struggling had just barely bought him enough room to get away.
He could hardly believe that the Fifth Holy Grail War, outside of the golden king and the Greek demigod Berserker, had produced a Servant this far outside normal parameters.
The stats were absurd. That maddening compound of effort and sweat. That infuriatingly beautiful figure.
When he had launched his paired spiral swords at the enemy's armor and the health bar hadn't moved even a fraction, he understood immediately: the gap between them was not a matter of different tiers. It was a different category entirely.
Even with a trump card or two remaining, the kind of absolute defense he had faced simply wasn't something he could break through. Only a similarly stat-inflated powerhouse, or something specifically designed as a hard counter, had any realistic chance. Everything else was just tickling.
"If even a Lancer has become like this, then the legendary Medea of the Age of Gods might genuinely be the kind of power the rumors claim. Seven Heroic Spirits."
The man in red murmured quietly to himself. This Holy Grail War was clearly not something that could be handled by merely "taking it seriously." Without some genuinely dirty tactics, the first night might well be a death sentence for ordinary Servants. And sitting above it all was Medea, the ultimate boss.
"Archer, are you all right?"
"I'll manage. The Lancer's Master likely can't sustain a sufficient magical supply, and in a pure melee test without full effort behind it, the gap between us wasn't entirely insurmountable."
Rin's casual inquiry earned a relaxed shrug from the man in red.
The one thing he hated most in this world was a pure stat monster with no technique involved. Gimmick types he could at least probe around. Pure stats were just maddening. No counter-play available whatsoever.
"...About the residential district, over there, I think..."
Rin hesitated.
"You're worried about the witness, aren't you? Master, you know what a proper mage's protocol is when a civilian accidentally stumbles into a Holy Grail War. Even if we don't handle it ourselves, there's no reasonable basis for stopping the Lancer from doing so."
During the clash at the school, a student who had come back to retrieve something had accidentally witnessed the battle between the two Servants. The student had hidden remarkably well. Neither the mages nor Masters had caught them in the first moments.
But as the fight reached its most intense phase, the student's position was exposed.
Which was why the fight ended without resolution. The Lancer and the man in red had mutually and silently agreed to a ceasefire.
Now the magical energy pulsing from the residential district was clearly the Lancer's. He had reported back to his Master and come to clean up the loose end.
They could have handled it at the school, but the student had vanished impossibly fast. One moment still in a classroom, less than ten seconds later the entire school had been swept and there was nothing. The physical speed, or whatever technique it was, had drawn even the Servant's attention.
"But he's my classmate. As the guardian of Fuyuki City, how can I just watch an innocent classmate be killed?"
Rin lowered her head, her voice small.
"Then, guardian of Fuyuki City, how much money is currently in your wallet?"
The man in red rolled his eyes.
"Th-, that's temporary. Once I become the mage Father was, I'll bring the Tohsaka family back to what it should be!"
Rin's cheeks went faintly pink, a slight awkwardness in her expression, though her tone still carried the pride of a fallen aristocrat.
"A civilian who ends up witnessing the Holy Grail War can have their memory erased with a hypnotic spell. Killing them outright is excessive, and this is a society with laws. If someone just suddenly dies..."
"Ah, so that's the 'impoverished but never without principles' school of thought. Broke as can be, still scattering kindness around."
So you really are not a proper mage.
The man in red couldn't help the thought. A mage who cared this much about a single ordinary person was, in the world of mages, practically an endangered species.
"All right, fine. Are you going or not? Don't worry, I'm just going to look. If the enemy has already silenced them by the time I get there, I won't say a word. Think of it as a late-night walk."
Rin straightened up with a small, dignified cough.
She probably wasn't a proper mage. But she remembered that the legendary Age of Gods mage, the face she could barely recall now, had protected ordinary people even in the middle of a Holy Grail War. If that woman could do it, she didn't see anything wrong with her own reasoning.
The world was dark. The mage world was darker. But even at the top of that world, there had been someone like that. Why shouldn't she be the same?
"...You're impossible to argue with. One condition: stay at a distance. That Lancer is considerably more powerful than I expected. If anything goes wrong, use a Command Seal to pull me back to you remotely."
The man in red gave a long-suffering sigh and stood up, grumbling like a fussy older sibling.
His greatest advantage in this Holy Grail War was long-range sniping of Masters. Direct close-range combat was genuinely not his strongest suit, and yet his own Master kept making him fight in melee. Did she ever think about what class he was?
Well. He just had to hope the Master lineup didn't shift too dramatically.
Otherwise if the sniping went wrong, the consequences would be squarely on his head.
Though Rin really did have some nerve, asking him to go retrieve someone he had personally wanted to kill.
The residential district. The Emiya family home.
"It won't hurt. Dying in sleep is painless and silent."
"You followed me all the way from the school?"
"I apologize. I have no wish to be your enemy. But my Master's instructions include leaving no witnesses. This is a tedious inevitability. Your misfortune was seeing what you saw."
"..."
A struggling sound, half-muffled.
The red-haired boy came tumbling out of the house in a rough sprawl, a steel pipe clutched in one hand, its surface threaded with faint magical circuits.
He had reddish-brown hair cut short, brown eyes that held a stubborn and straightforward intensity full of righteousness. His eyebrows tapered at the ends into shapes like lightning bolts. He wore a black-and-white hoodie and blue jeans, and his right arm was bleeding from the force of a massive impact.
"Since it is my Master's expectation, I must fulfill it. I apologize again."
"Innocent young mage."
Flames burned across the Servant's form.
Facing the red-haired boy was a strikingly handsome man, his hair a mass of white tossed by the night wind. His body was encased in golden armor over a black leather inner garment. His calm red eyes seemed to hold something smoldering within them. His chest was broad and open, a striking red jewel set into the center of it, strange and beautiful. His expression was blank and unreadable, the kind of blank that came from having looked through everything there was to see. His skin was pale as someone with albinism, and his entire presence produced an inexplicable pressure just by existing.
Pressure.
Flames.
Strength that could not be matched.
This was a Servant. An exceptionally powerful Servant, one that would rank in the top three even in the Fourth Holy Grail War, a pinnacle existence from the highest reaches of mythological legend.
In his hand was a spear, its tip extending outward in the shape of a broad-bladed long triangle, an impossibly shaped divine weapon beyond the limits of anything a human being could wield. The proportions of spear to haft to blade defied all rational expectation. It was almost impossible to imagine anyone using a weapon like this.
The long spear in his hands ignited with surging flame. With what seemed like only a casual swing, the burning heat set the entire courtyard ablaze. The house began to dissolve.
The shockwave from the erupting flames spread through the air, a scorching wave sealing off every possible escape route for the red-haired boy.
"Time Alter, double accel!"
The heat wave crashed in.
In the instant before being consumed, the red-haired boy's speed erupted suddenly upward.
At the very last moment, he tore through the area that would have incinerated him and surged toward the exit of the inferno, sprinting toward the parts of the night city that still had people and light in them. From the spearman's reactions he had already judged that the Servant absolutely would not expose himself in a populated area. Like a ghost in a horror film that would never appear in a crowded street, this thing had its own constraints.
If he could just reach that place, if he could just make it there...
Bang.
By the standard of an ordinary person, even a mage, his speed was impressive.
To this particular spearman, it was the final desperate flailing of a startled sparrow.
"A magecraft that converts oneself into a miniature bounded field? Peculiar, for someone who appears to know almost nothing about magecraft."
A puzzled voice touched his ear. A white blur cut through the air.
The frantically fleeing red-haired boy took a heavy impact from behind, one step away from escape, a horizontal kick that sent him flying. He tried to block with the steel pipe but was already too late. For a moment his mind went blank.
"Ugh... gh..."
The shattering pain of broken ribs flooded his consciousness. He was launched dozens of meters and slammed into the storage shed in the courtyard, blood pouring freely from his nose and mouth.
His vision unfocused. His awareness began to cloud. He lay in the wreckage of wood planks and blood and couldn't move, and if no one intervened, he would quickly die here in the fire.
Was he going to die?
Was he going to die right here?
Just because he had happened to see a fight by chance, he was going to die like this?
Drifting toward unconsciousness, the boy felt a surge of both anger and bitter refusal rise up inside him.
His name was Emiya Shirou. One of the survivors of the great Fuyuki fire ten years ago, the boy dug out of the rubble and rescued by his foster father Emiya Kiritsugu.
He had inherited his foster father's Magic Crest and that man's naïve ideals, and had made them his own road.
He had received no proper mage education. He was a completely ordinary person who happened to know of magecraft's existence and had spent ten perfectly ordinary years as a high school student because of it. The spearman's assessment had not been wrong. He was, in terms of magecraft, essentially starting from zero.
So someone this ordinary getting killed by a stranger who was stronger and more unknown. That was just how it worked, wasn't it. His foster father had told him before passing on the Magic Crest: for a mage, being killed at any random moment was simply a fact of life.
"Your death will be attributed to a gas leak. You and this house will burn away together."
The flat voice came again. The shed and warehouse began to catch fire in earnest. The man in golden armor with the pale skin walked in and raised his spear.
Then he began to bring it down.
"Time Alter, triple accel!"
Don't be absurd, Kiritsugu. Even if I'm going to be killed suddenly, I shouldn't die like this.
I made you a promise. To carry on the ideal you never completed. To find and save the daughter you spent your entire life trying to reach, the sister you told me about whom I have never met.
Before those promises are fulfilled, before you paid the cost of your own Magic Crest to ask this of me, I will not fall here.
BANG. BANG.
Blood burst outward. A fresh wound was opened across his torso. The spear shattered the concrete underfoot.
Watching the bloodied boy twist away yet again and roll to the center of the shed, the spearman's expression, normally still as deep water, flickered with a trace of actual surprise. He hadn't been trying his hardest. Killing an ordinary person held no particular interest. But the boy had now dodged two casual strikes in a row, and that was genuinely unexpected.
Time-type magecraft, used twice in succession, and the body was still functional enough to sustain it.
"This is tedious. You are only prolonging your own pain. You cannot escape."
The flames wrapped tighter around the spearhead.
The spearman shook his head and prepared to finish this a little more seriously.
"I have to survive. I need to survive. I still have obligations that haven't been fulfilled!"
A certain man's ideal. A certain man's regret.
"Justice requires living to be carried out, and living is the foundation I need to reach that ideal!"
The flaming spear came straight at him. Emiya Shirou, soaked in blood and running on empty, knew it was over.
He knew he was finished. But he wasn't wrong. Choosing to live was never wrong.
Giving up on living was wrong. That man had told him: the greatest justice in this world was living yourself and letting others live. That was the answer he had found in his life.
So how could he possibly let himself be killed quietly in this place by someone who treated life as meaningless?
Clang.
The debris burned away. Three vivid red Command Seals appeared on the back of his hand, and the silver-thread pendant at his chest seemed to resonate in response.
"What..."
A surge of overwhelming magical energy crashed into the spearman and sent him skidding back in an instant.
The scale of this magical energy was even more terrifying than his own.
"A seventh Servant, arriving at this final moment... a miracle called forth at the last second?!"