I'm Not A Master, I'm A Director
Chapter 440: A Kind of Beauty Called Stella
"Cough… cough…"
Inside the warehouse of the Shirou Emiya residence, Ritsuka lay collapsed in a pool of blood, weakly coughing.
Having always believed his life would remain painfully ordinary, he had never imagined he would one day experience something this dramatic—such as being relentlessly hunted down by a giant musclebound man.
Unfortunately, it seemed his luck had run out.
And so had his life.
Watching Hassan slowly step into the warehouse, Ritsuka no longer had the strength to stand.
As death crept closer, his mind drifted back to the moment he first met Mash. Back then, he had asked her why she insisted on calling him Senpai.
"A reason… you ask?"
At the time, Mash had covered her mouth with a gentle smile.
"Because, Senpai, you are the most human person I've ever met. I can't sense any threat from you at all… which is why I've never had any reason to be hostile toward you."
"Heh… what kind of reason is that…"
Ritsuka laughed weakly at himself.
"The truth isn't that I pose no threat… it's that I'm too powerless to threaten anyone in the first place…"
Mocking his own helplessness, he quietly awaited judgment.
Hassan slowly raised his hand high, preparing to end Ritsuka's life.
"Senpai——!"
A miracle appeared.
A sudden gust of wind swept through the silent warehouse. A girl clad in armor, wielding a massive shield, leapt between the boy and Hassan.
Crack
The white skull mask shattered beneath the impact of the shield. Sensing danger, Hassan immediately retreated backward.
"Hah!"
The armored girl raised her shield with both hands and slammed it into the ground—
BOOM!!
The instant the shield struck the floor, a violent shockwave erupted outward and slammed directly into the retreating Hassan.
"GAAAAAH—!"
The dark giant let out a scream. Suspended in midair, his body scattered apart like a torn rag caught in a storm.
After dealing with Hassan, the knightly girl slowly turned around.
The clouds drifted apart, allowing silver moonlight to spill into the warehouse, illuminating the armored maiden.
"Y-You are…?"
The contrast between the dying girl from only minutes ago and the girl before him was so overwhelming that Ritsuka could barely recognize her.
"Allow me to introduce myself properly."
Her smile remained just as warm and infectious as before.
And just like another boy before him, Ritsuka found himself robbed of words the moment he looked at her.
"My name is Mash Kyrielight. I am your Servant."
"Please take care of me, Master."
On that very same night, in that very same place, another story between a boy and a girl quietly began.
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"Nighttime. A warehouse. A boy, moonlight, and a girl! Yep, this is exactly that kind of scene!"
Aoko nodded in satisfaction.
"Even if Mash didn't make a traditional summoning entrance, it still feels like a tribute to the classics~ So, Fujita, what do you think?"
Aoko turned toward her companion, curious about his reaction now that the heroic spirit girl he'd been obsessing over had finally appeared.
Only to discover him staring fixedly at the television screen, trembling nonstop.
"W-What is this?! Is this seriously that clumsy glasses girl?! She's like a completely different person!! Is it the lab coat's fault?! Her earlier outfit totally failed to show how insanely attractive she actually is!"
"So… your thoughts?" Aoko asked again.
"My thoughts? She's amazing! That incredible figure, that badass armor, and that blessed voice— how can there exist a Heroic Spirit as unbelievably perfect as Mash Kyrielight?!"
"Uh…"
Aoko had originally planned to quietly remind him that he was supposed to be an Arturia Pendragon fan, but seeing Fujita in such a crazed state, she immediately gave up.
Changing waifus every three months was basically Fujita's trademark among their group. Aoko had long since grown used to how quickly he switched loyalties.
"Hmph. Typical otaku."
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For Mash, reuniting with her Senpai after becoming a Demi-Servant was a romantic moment worthy of legend.
But for the other main character of this moonlit masterpiece—Ritsuka Fujimaru himself—he was completely bewildered.
There was simply no way he could connect the armored knight before him, carrying a shield large enough to crush a person to death, with the timid underclassman in glasses from earlier.
Still, there was one thing Ritsuka could confirm for certain.
The girl before him had unquestionably surpassed humanity itself.
She had become something like the superheroes straight out of manga.
After all, what kind of normal human could swing around a shield taller than themselves and unleash a shockwave powerful enough to pulverize a person?
"Mash… what exactly is with that outfit…?"
Ritsuka's cautious probing did nothing to change Mash's respectful attitude toward him.
"That's right, Senpai. I've become your Servant."
"S-Se… Servant?"
With Ritsuka's painfully limited English vocabulary, the word servant basically meant maid or attendant to him.
A delicate young girl calling herself his servant and addressing him as Master…
In Ritsuka's understanding, that was the sort of luxury you could only experience after paying money at a maid café.
[What is this, some kind of new-age prank show?!]
Compared to the trembling Ritsuka—who looked like he was one second away from being accused of harassment—Mash Kyrielight herself appeared remarkably calm and composed.
Kneeling down, she gently supported his shoulders.
"Senpai, I'm going to modify your Mystic Code now…"
A flash of white light swept over him.
The Chaldea uniform Ritsuka had been wearing instantly transformed into the uniform of the Mage's Association.
In the original FGO game, the most important functions of this outfit were its ability to reshuffle Command Cards and grant a single ally 20% NP. The party-wide healing skill was basically just a bonus.
But in Shinji's FGO film series, healing had become this outfit's primary purpose.
Its secondary role was emergency mana replenishment for Servants.
Thanks to the healing magecraft built into the Mystic Code, Ritsuka finally managed to recover enough to stop lying helplessly on the floor.
[The pain's gone… so this is the wonder of magecraft?]
But before he could fully celebrate, Mash slipped one hand beneath his shoulder blades and the other under his knees and lifted him entirely off the ground.
"Eh? Mash?"
The moment she positioned her hands, Ritsuka realized with absolute certainty what she was doing.
It was a textbook princess carry.
It wasn't as though Ritsuka didn't know that the official term was a horizontal carry, and that medically speaking it was often used for emergency rescue situations.
The problem was—his injuries were basically healed already.
There was no reason to carry him anywhere else for treatment.
More importantly, the one carrying him was Mash, whose frame was noticeably smaller than his own.
To exaggerate the image a little, it was like watching Peter Dinklage carrying Shaquille O'Neal.
Whether or not Peter could actually lift him wasn't the issue.
Shaquille would definitely be the embarrassed one.
"I'm sorry, Senpai."
Unfortunately, Mash showed absolutely no awareness of how humiliating this was for him.
"We need to move quickly right now. There's another person we have to rendezvous with."
"Another person?"
"Yes. Someone Senpai knows as well… though they're rather far away."
Mash paused briefly before adding:
"So we'll have to fly there."
"Fly…?"
That particular verb sent a chill down Ritsuka's spine.
But before he could even react, Mash had already leapt high into the air with him in her arms.
"Target requiring assistance confirmed five kilometers ahead! Deploying Shield behind us—commencing spatial stabilization!"
After visually confirming the distance midair, Mash summoned her enormous shield beneath her feet.
Then she bent her knees slightly, gathering power into her lower body.
"The shield just—"
The sudden appearance of the massive shield startled Ritsuka.
A moment ago, he had still been wondering where on earth Mash had been storing something that huge.
He'd even started suspecting she might pull it out anime-style from some kind of four-dimensional cleavage pocket.
"We're moving now, Senpai!"
Realizing what Mash intended to do, Ritsuka hurriedly tried to stop her—only for Mash to calmly reply:
"Master, please do not open your mouth."
"You may die."
[And you're saying that so casually?!]
Before even his internal scream could finish, Ritsuka suddenly discovered that his entire sense of position had vanished.
Holding him securely in her arms, Mash shot forward like a human missile toward the distant horizon.
"We'll be landing shortly! Master, please brace for impact!"
At that moment, only two thoughts remained in Ritsuka's head:
First—what exactly did she mean by impact?
And second—how was he supposed to brace himself when he couldn't move at all?!
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"A normal person would die from that, right?"
Shirou Emiya's guess earned an immediate nod from Shinji.
"Of course. The human cervical spine can't withstand that kind of acceleration. Your head would literally fly off."
"Though before you became the Headless Horseman, you'd already be dead from a snapped neck."
"So then…" Shirou joked, "how exactly did an ordinary human like Ritsuka Fujimaru survive that?"
"You're usually obsessed with realism in your movies, yet you actually included a scene like this?"
"If I really cared that much about realism," Shinji replied flatly, "you wouldn't have had nearly so many chances to fight Heroic Spirits for the audience's entertainment."
"You'd have died so thoroughly there wouldn't even be ashes left."
Shinji crossed one leg over the other and answered with complete disdain.
"So why exactly didn't Ritsuka Fujimaru die?"
Shirou Emiya raised an eyebrow teasingly, clearly intending to argue this point with Shinji for a while.
Shinji's answer, however, was absurdly straightforward.
"In comics, superheroes carry people through the sky doing all kinds of insane stunts all the time, and nobody dies there either."
"Superheroes? Don't they usually have some kind of bio-field or force field protecting people or something?"
Shirou hadn't expected Shinji to suddenly bring up Western superhero comics.
"So Mash has the same thing," Shinji replied matter-of-factly.
"Since when did Heroic Spirits have bio-fields? You'd have an easier time convincing me it was magecraft."
"No," Shinji corrected him flatly.
"What I mean is: if the writer wants him alive, then he lives."
Shirou: (￢_￢)
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On the screen, Mash continued flying through the night sky with Ritsuka held in her arms like a human missile.
Their destination is the streets of Fuyuki.
The place itself wasn't particularly special, except for the fact that a helpless silver-haired girl with crimson ribbons was currently fleeing from the pursuit of a suspicious creep.
Nobody knew exactly what kind of grudge Kawaguchi Takeshi had against Hassan, but the three Hassan variants appearing in the prologue all looked horrifyingly inhuman.
First there was the muscular brute chasing after Ritsuka, then there was the lanky, grotesque creep with unnaturally thin limbs who had ambushed him in the warehouse alongside Muscle Hassan.
And finally, the pot-bellied middle-aged pervert currently pursuing the director.
If not for the skull masks, most players would've assumed these things were an early implementation of the "Glutton Ghoul" enemies from Part 1.5 Chapter 4.
Out of respect for a certain Old Man whose name should not be spoken lightly, Shinji's adaptation of the Prologue toned down the Hassan designs somewhat.
Originally, the scene should have featured three separate clones of Hundred-Faced Hassan.
But Shinji only retained the bulky clone from the beginning.
As for the Hassan chasing the director—he was directly replaced with a bald Darius III instead.
Truthfully, no matter which version of the lore you followed, Darius wasn't an opponent Mash should've been able to defeat alone so easily.
But unfortunately for him, the person writing this Fate story was Shinji.
And Darius just so happened to be the Servant who loved appearing during every gacha roll to mock Shinji for his terrible luck.
So honestly, if he didn't die, then who would?
BOOOOOOM————!!
Using her own body like a falling meteor, Mash crashed down from the night sky directly onto Darius below.
"A certain kind of beauty… worthy of Stella."
Watching the cloud of dust rise across the television screen, Shinji nodded in complete satisfaction.
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Tn: I updated the story once every 2 days, but if you want to see more chapter of this story ahead of time, please go to my Patreon.
Latest Chapter: Chapter 476: Shirou: I'll Take Both[1]!
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[1] https://www.patreon.com/Thatsnakegirl/posts/im-not-master-im-165055398?collection=31097
[2] https://www.patreon.com/Thatsnakegirl/posts/im-not-master-im-165055398?collection=31097