That had been three years ago. Another night, another silence.
Fuyuki City's nights always felt cool and quiet. His foster father, who used to return from his constant work trips beaten and worn down to nothing, had finally slowed after some combination of age and a body that had deteriorated past the point of ignoring, and had settled into an unusual stillness. Outside of occasionally sitting in his study to write letters to someone unknown, he spent his evenings quietly watching the stars and the moon.
Emiya Shirou didn't know his foster father's past. Beyond the rare moment when Kiritsugu had let slip some basic magecraft concept, he didn't even know where the man had originally come from.
Sometimes he was genuinely curious. What kind of person was he, really? Why did he always respond with that bitter, self-mocking smile whenever the past was brought up, and never speak of it?
And whenever Shirou tried to ask about magecraft, the same wall went up. As if he was reluctant to let Shirou step into a new world.
"Hey, old man. If you're going to sleep, go do it in bed. Dozing out here at night is going to get you sick."
The not-yet-very-old Emiya Shirou, newly in middle school, sat on the steps of their small courtyard and grumbled with quiet concern, watching the moon side by side with the man next to him in his casual robe.
About a year or two before this, Kiritsugu had been a workaholic in the truest sense, spending ten of twelve months every year at work in Germany, returning for the remaining two only when he absolutely couldn't go on, then leaving again after brief recovery, putting aside some living money and asking Taiga to look after Shirou before disappearing once more.
Shirou never knew what the man was doing in Germany. What he knew was that in this final year-plus of quiet, Kiritsugu had seemed more at ease. He even occasionally relaxed. The man his doctor had declared wouldn't last long had somehow held on, stubbornly preserving himself through sheer determination to keep writing his letters, even as his body continued to worsen.
"No, it's fine. I'm fine. At least I can hold on until the letters from Germany come back."
Emiya Kiritsugu spoke gently, with a kind of lightness that belonged to someone who already knew their time was running short and was no longer fighting it. The color had returned to his face over the last few days in a way that felt like the quiet brightness before an ending.
People needed something to look forward to. Like the answer he had once spent his life chasing.
He understood now how foolish his past had been, how absurd it was that he had ever believed in something as intangible as the Holy Grail.
Now that it was gone, only two things remained.
To raise and save this boy, Shirou, the child he had pulled from the rubble of the Fuyuki fire.
And to ensure that his daughter didn't end up the way she had in the Fourth Holy Grail War.
"Who are you even writing to, old man? Business partners? Someone you like? Or is it that world you've always told me to stay away from..."
"My daughter. And Shirou's older sister."
"Sister?"
"That's right, a sister. She says in her letters that she's very fond of you."
This time Kiritsugu didn't deflect. He spoke about his daughter openly, warmly, the girl he had risked his life fighting the Einzbern family for over several years in Germany, all for the chance of a single visit. The beloved snow spirit he had never quite reached.
Unfortunately, even giving everything he had, exhausting his mercenary guild savings to place bounties on the Einzbern family's homunculi, calling in every old connection he had left and paying enormously to fight the Einzberns to a standstill, the final result had still amounted to very little. If it hadn't been for the fact that the Einzberns had been so eager to acquire Medea of the Age of Gods's catalyst, they wouldn't have had any reason to take him seriously at all.
The rumors about him severing the Einzbern family's economic lifeline? Exaggeration from people who enjoyed a dramatic story. The Einzbern family, which held the Rhine gold, was never going to run out of money.
And in a war of attrition, an Einzbern homunculus could live for centuries or millennia. What ordinary person, or even mage, could outlast them?
The Einzberns had agreed to terms not out of respect for his abilities, but because the homunculi's programming simply didn't value honor enough to keep spending resources on it. The core dispute between them had always been one person: Illyasviel von Einzbern. He wanted to take her away. They wouldn't allow it. That was the only reason war had ever broken out.
And by then, with the old wounds from his youth and the curses from the Fourth Holy Grail War compounding each other, he hadn't had much time left. The Einzberns had seen that clearly, and on that basis had offered the compromise: letters. He and Illyasviel could exchange correspondence.
He hadn't had a choice by that point. The fighting had emptied out his finances, shattered his network, and destroyed his body.
He reached an understanding with the Einzbern family. In exchange for surrendering his Origin Bullet Mystic Code as compensation for their losses, the Einzberns would allow the father and daughter to write letters, and would treat Illyasviel as well as circumstances permitted.
"Shirou..."
"When I was very young, I dreamed of becoming someone's hero."
Emiya Kiritsugu looked up at the pale moon with vacant eyes, and let a small, resigned smile onto his lips.
He had never spoken to his foster son about his past. But perhaps he really was getting old. Or perhaps losing Irisviel, and then spending these years with Shirou and exchanging letters with Illya, had gradually made him feel more and more like something other than a numb professional killer.
"What do you mean 'dreamed'? Are you saying you gave up?"
"Yes. Regrettably. Heroes have a shelf life. Once you're grown, it stops being heroism. I should have realized that sooner. If I had, I might have been able to take you to meet your sister."
"That so? Guess there's nothing to be done, then."
"Yeah. Really nothing to be done."
A short, self-deprecating laugh.
Emiya Kiritsugu shook his head slowly. But there were no such things as "what ifs" in this world.
If he hadn't become a mage killer, the Einzbern family would never have hired him for the Fourth Holy Grail War. He would never have had Irisviel as a wife, or Illyasviel as a daughter.
If someone asked whether he regretted his life, his answer would probably still be the same as what had been said at that banquet during the war, what the Conqueror King Iskandar, the King Arthur Altria, and the extraordinary mage Illyasviel had all agreed on. Those who pursue an ideal might falter. But they do not regret it. Because they were exactly that kind of fool, that willingly ignorant.
"Since there's nothing to be done, I'll do it for you. I'll be your hero."
The young boy turned his head with easy lightness and said it.
"You're an adult, old man, so it's too late for you. But I'm still a kid. I can still do it. Your dreams, your regrets, hand them all over to me."
Young and righteous and burning with the confidence of someone who hadn't yet been broken. It might have been nothing more than something comforting to say in the moment.
But Emiya Kiritsugu stared at him, and felt like he was seeing something new.
"You'll grow up eventually too, Shirou. And perhaps you and she will never cross paths in this lifetime, the same way I can only reach her through letters. You might not understand what you're saying right now. But you'll come to understand, slowly, what this kind of thinking means..."
"I think you're the one who doesn't understand, old man. I'll save Sister. And I'll become someone's hero."
"..."
"No matter how hard something is, you have to try, don't you? You've already tried, and the end result was failure. But I haven't tried yet. If everyone looked at something difficult and decided not to attempt it, wouldn't the people who actually could do something just get swept along by that defeatism?"
Emiya Kiritsugu exhaled with a deep, rueful smile. He realized he had apparently neglected this boy's ideological education during all those work trips.
Why was he this naïve? As naïve as his younger self had once been. As naïve as the fools who had died in the Holy Grail War.
"But you might die. Aren't you afraid? These things could kill you."
"They won't. I'll live. Everyone will live. Saving everyone is what justice means to me, because a long time ago, vaguely, I think I saw a sister I've almost forgotten do the same thing."
The boy's voice was unwavering. This wasn't a performance. It was a conviction that had taken root after the Fuyuki fire, something deep and foundational. He didn't want anyone else to live through the tragedy he had.
The person caught in the rain was only ever meant to be him. Everyone else should have an umbrella.
Living was justice. Everyone surviving: that was the greatest justice in the world.
"...But eventually there will be a trolley problem."
"Then I'll beat up the person who set it up, or flip the trolley over."
"You can't save everyone. Some people will inevitably have to be sacrificed."
"How would you know without trying?"
Watching the boy in front of him whose eyes held not a trace of doubt or uncertainty, Emiya Kiritsugu felt like he was looking at someone he had known. The obsession of a certain girl who had shone brilliantly in the Fourth Holy Grail War.
Their obsessions were the same. Both believed that living happily in this world was the greatest justice. Despite never having met, they were remarkably alike.
Only that one wanted happiness for herself.
And the other wanted happiness for everyone.
These two, siblings with no blood tie and no prior meeting, had both apparently walked headlong into the same kind of extreme called happiness.
Emiya Kiritsugu felt a quiet ache he couldn't fully name. But in the end he didn't say anything more.
Suffering creates a longing for happiness. These two were both children who had lost their closest people from the very beginning.
Not long after, Emiya Kiritsugu slipped into a final, quiet sleep in his afternoon reclining chair.
The afternoon sunlight was the last warmth of his life.
He left everything in his name to Emiya Shirou: all his estate, his Magic Crest, and everything he had learned as a mage-contractor over a lifetime. Perhaps he was trusting in the naivety of a child. Or perhaps he genuinely hoped that one day Shirou would find a way to take Illyasviel out of the Einzbern family's hands, rescue her, and find some quiet distant place for both of them to live.
The Einzberns would never release Illyasviel. Even though Kiritsugu had deliberately concealed the truth, that "Medea of the Age of Gods" had been Illyasviel's assumed identity, it hadn't changed the fact that Illyasviel had become the Einzbern family's greatest achievement, a figure that would inevitably be committed to the next Holy Grail War.
And as their greatest achievement, her fate, like Irisviel's, had already been written.
Because the agreement between him and the Einzbern family had only ever been valid for as long as he lived.
After that, Emiya Shirou entered high school. Without any systematic magecraft education or lineage, he nonetheless possessed twenty-seven natural Magic Circuits and had quickly mastered Time Alter. He had never once revealed his identity as a mage. In truth, he was less a mage and more a mage-contractor in the mold of his foster father, someone who had mastered only the basic magecraft of Projection. He had never truly touched the dark side of the mage world, and could only glimpse fragments of it through the notes Kiritsugu had left behind. At least, that had been true until tonight.
"Tell me."
"Are you my Master?"
A torrent of black magical energy swallowed the flames, forming a vortex like a hurricane.
The blue summoning array was dyed black. From within that quiet and tranquil flood of dark energy came a voice, and as the voice spoke, the array's magical power slowly built and shaped something: a body, a Saint Graph, taking form before the boy who had collapsed and was bleeding on the floor.
Pale moonlight filtered down, illuminating the figure of a small girl kneeling on one knee.
Her magical energy was more terrifying than the white spearman's, more intensely present and more deeply wrong, a quantity that none of the Servants who had appeared in Fuyuki's Holy Grail War thus far could compare to. She was, in every sense, a walking ley line in human shape.
Black. Pure black.
Darkness without a single note of color mixed in.
The not-particularly-tall girl opened her eyes, and they were black all the way through, no whites at all. She wore a black gown trimmed with gold, as if dressed for a princess's court. Her beautiful silver hair lifted in the current of magical energy. Her calves and feet were bare, without shoes or stockings, kneeling clean and pale against the dust-covered ground, like a dark spirit of the night having just emerged from a forest.
Her expression was composed but not cold. Her voice was clear and melodious, like the ringing of a bell.
Something in her manner was a little like an emotionless machine, and at the same time a little like the spearman, as if she too had looked through all of existence and found it unremarkable.
Worth noticing were two small pouches fastened to the outer side of her bare thigh, the kind a battlefield soldier might use for ammunition.
One pouch held several cards layered like a stack of playing cards, matte black with no luster.
The other held a single card, brilliant gold and radiant.
"Mas... ter? Wait, you're..."
Heavily wounded, baked by intense heat, and battered from multiple uses of Time Alter, Emiya Shirou looked up with blurred awareness at the small girl slowly rising to her feet. Her back was to the moonlit doorway as she asked her question.
The fallen boy and the girl's eyes met. For that instant, the whole world seemed to go quiet.
He pressed a hand to his aching head, grinding his teeth as if some distant, half-forgotten memory was struggling to surface.
"Are you hurt?"
She glanced at the three vivid red Command Seals on the back of Emiya Shirou's hand and tilted her head slightly.
A relic summon. During the great fire all those years ago, a mage had apparently retrieved something of hers.
It seemed the gamble had paid off. This failure of a Heroic Spirit who had once clung to existence with a broken Saint Graph had been given a chance to begin again.
"What is your name?"
"Emiya. Shirou."
"What is your wish?"
"I want... to live."
To carry on that man's ideal. To make up for what that man had never finished in his lifetime. To save the sister that man had spoken of, the sister I have never met. To let her live happily. For all of that, I need to live. Until all of it is done, no matter what hardship or danger stands in front of me, I will live.
The half-conscious, fading red-haired boy answered the moonlit spirit's question on pure instinct.
"To live."
Such a small and yet extravagant wish. But it was, precisely, the greatest justice.
"Then the contract is formed."
The girl in the black dress turned to face the pale spearman bathed in the burning light of the courtyard. She raised one hand, and with an expression completely unchanged from before, gave a small wave.
The magical flame exploded outward from the tip of his spear with violent force. The wind howled and coiled. The entire courtyard was set ablaze by that same unreasonable surge of heat. The air itself warped with the distortion. The golden armor blazed more brilliantly in the firelight, and not a trace of fatigue or surprise crossed his face. Even sensing that the enemy's magical energy vastly exceeded his own, this hero who burned like a small sun did not flinch for an instant.
Because raw magical energy didn't mean everything. In a Holy Grail War, the true measure of power was what was called Divinity. No matter how vast your magical reserves, they couldn't match the all-encompassing attribute enhancement that Divinity provided. One was stored gunpowder waiting to be spent. The other was a missile launcher already aimed and ready.
"Pure malice? Is this an evil spirit? A magical beast? Or a fallen god?"
The skill Pauper's Wisdom at Rank A let the spearman see through the nature and attributes of the small girl in front of him without difficulty, immune to any deception through words or appearance. It was something like the ability to read an enemy's true nature.
"Hmph."
"As expected."
The spearman's expression shifted, just slightly, as if having finally encountered someone in this Holy Grail War worth taking even marginally seriously. The brief clash with the man in red at the school clearly hadn't been enough to satisfy him.
The blade in his hand cut through the air in a light horizontal swing. The flames rose up instantly like a tidal wave.
The earth was scorched and cracked with ease. Everything in the courtyard was melting. The magical energy in the air fully ignited, a brilliance like the devouring light of all creation sweeping toward that crumbling, shattered house infused with black and malevolent magical power.
Boom.
The flames swallowed the house.
The small girl in the black dress seemed frozen in place, making not a single movement, apparently watching as herself and her already-bleeding-out Master were about to be consumed.
"Sleep well. In this Holy Grail War, your life is mine to guard."
"No one but me will stand in the way of your continued existence."
The girl's calm, gentle voice drifted out. In the face of the spearman's "so that's how it is" gaze:
The girl in the black dress raised her small hand and gave it a quiet wave. The dark magical energy coalesced into something real and solid, a black mud as thick as ink. The fire that had been burning without pause through sustained magical energy met that black mud and instantly recoiled as if from a natural enemy, shrinking back. Flames that should never extinguish as long as magical energy was supplied had their supply chain severed by that mud, cut entirely.
This was a one-sided crushing through sheer magical volume, suppressing the flames by outputting higher-grade magical energy to override them. And the ability to accomplish this meant the small girl was, without question, a Three Knights class Heroic Spirit just like the spearman.
Wait. Three Knights? With this volume of magical energy, how could she be a Three Knights class?
And if she was Three Knights, where was the weapon she should be carrying?
The spearman found himself genuinely confused.
"Strength B. Endurance C. Agility B. Mana C. Luck D. Noble Phantasm EX."
"?"
"Dragged down by the Master's qualifications. But a Divinity at A-rank is enough to compensate for reduced base stats."
"You..."
A probing spell? No.
Could a probing spell read Divinity rank as well?
What class was she?
"A Servant above the top tier, and the very first battle has to be against this kind of matchlessly brilliant hero who can't be overcome even at full effort. I'll have to be careful and feel things out."
Calmly said. But the moment the words left Illyasviel's lips, her pure black eyes gleamed softly. In an instant, she reached into the pouch on her outer left thigh and pulled out one of the black cards, one that had lost all its luster: a Saber class card.
She held it up high and crushed it in her fingers.
Black magical energy surged and gathered toward her palm like something drawn by gravity. Her black dress billowed in the ensuing whirlwind of power. The void compressed by that force rapidly extended outward, took shape, and formed: a weapon of deep black with veins of red tracing through it, manifesting in her hand.
A sword.
A black-and-red sword.
A weapon that, by rights, someone at Illyasviel's former Noble Phantasm rank should never have been able to use.
"For you... I think this card is the one."
The moment she finished speaking, the magical energy detonated along the blade.
Clang!
So fast.
Blade met spear in an instant.
Black magical energy and searing flame intertwined, like the goddess of night locked in battle with a god of the sun.
Stats that matched his own Divinity-enhanced values across the board.
It told the spearman everything he needed to know: every word Illyasviel had said had been modesty. Her numbers were not inferior to his. They were at least as high, and in at least two categories, higher.
Something had gone wrong here. This was not an opponent that could be resolved casually. Continuous battle and the costs of materialization had already eaten through the magical reserves that one Command Seal had provided today.
"By the power of this Command Seal, restore your magical energy, Lancer."
"Bring the enemy before you in alive. Take her to the basement of the Church."