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*****
"Seven participants—six have already appeared. Only one is left.
But there's no rush. Even if all seven are chosen, I can always seize a spot by force."
George set aside all the magic books.
According to the phone call Tohsaka Rin received earlier, five Masters had already summoned their Servants, and Rin was the sixth. The only class yet to be summoned was Saber.
If his guess was correct, the seventh Master was likely to be Emiya Shirou.
After all, the Saber-class Master of the Fourth Holy Grail War had been Emiya Kiritsugu—who just so happened to be Shirou's adoptive father.
And Shirou carried within him a magical artifact resembling a scabbard, very likely a catalyst for summoning Saber.
George had two ways to enter the Holy Grail War. First: he could use the catalyst hidden inside Emiya Shirou to summon Saber and directly become the seventh Master.
That wouldn't be difficult. He had already seen the summoning ritual—Matou family's grimoires recorded it in detail.
With his level of skill, he could analyze it in minutes and reproduce it flawlessly.
Second: he could simply pick any current participant, eliminate the Master, and then form a new contract with their already-summoned Servant—that would also make him a Master.
In fact, that was an implicit rule of the Holy Grail War.
To truly end an opposing faction, both the Master and Servant had to die.
If the Master survived, they could summon another Servant. If the Servant survived, they could form a new contract with another magus and reenter the War.
The Matou archives also contained the magecraft for such contracts—the Matou family had created the summoning ritual itself, so naturally, they possessed much related knowledge.
Even Matou Sakura could temporarily loan a Servant to the completely ordinary Matou Shinji and make him a Master in the War.
"…He's injured?"
Just as the saying goes—speak of someone and they appear. Moments after George guessed Shirou was the seventh Master, he saw him return.
The combined collections of the two families totaled quite a lot. Even with George's mental power, reading and fully understanding everything had taken two full days.
It was already the evening of the third day.
But Emiya Shirou's condition clearly wasn't right—his eyes were unfocused, his face pale, and there was a patch of blood on his chest.
Looking closely, though his clothes at the chest and back were torn and stained, no actual injury remained.
That suggested someone had run him through the chest with something like a spear, but had then healed him with restorative magecraft.
"Is he being chased?"
Just as Shirou muttered and stepped into the room, George sensed a figure rapidly closing in from the distance.
It was a young man wearing a blue combat outfit, wielding a crimson spear. He gave off a similar aura to the Archer Tohsaka Rin had summoned.
He was likely another Master's Servant—one of the seven.
"Holding a spear—that should be Lancer. If Lancer is chasing Shirou, seems my guess was right."
Leaping across the rooftops, the blue-clad youth quickly arrived above Shirou's house. Without a word, he thrust his spear straight down.
Shirou, lying down inside the house, rolled aside just in time, grabbed a rolled-up poster, reinforced it with his magecraft, and used it as a makeshift weapon to fight back against Lancer.
Sadly, the difference in power was overwhelming. In a single exchange, Shirou was kicked clean out of the room and landed hard in the yard.
And that was only because Lancer hadn't tried to kill him immediately.
"Why are you trying to kill me?!"
Shirou barely stood, baffled.
Just earlier, he had been cleaning the archery club dojo at school when he saw two strange people fighting. Soon after, the man before him had run him through the chest in one blow.
In a daze, he vaguely saw a girl saving him.
When he awoke, those two strange people were gone, so he went home.
No sooner had he arrived than the killer returned to finish the job.
He couldn't understand—he had no grudge against these weirdos, so why insist on killing him?
"Can't be helped. I don't want to kill you either, but by the rules of the Holy Grail War, witnesses have to be eliminated. You're just unlucky."
The young man twirled his spear with showy flair, looking helpless as he spoke.
"So it was just an accident."
Hearing their exchange, George realized he had guessed wrong.
He'd assumed Lancer was hunting Shirou because Shirou was a Master in the War.
But it turned out Shirou had only witnessed a Servant battle by chance.
"To save or not?"
Shirou had nothing to do with him. Based on his personality, George made such decisions entirely by mood—he wasn't some champion of justice.
Besides, if Shirou died, George could conveniently take that intriguing magical artifact from his body.
But the next moment, he changed his mind.
At the brink of death, a faint Command Seal pattern surfaced on Shirou's left hand, and a summoning circle appeared in the storage shed beside the yard.
"So he really is the seventh Master."
Completely confirming Shirou's identity, George acted without hesitation.
"I was trying to give you a quick death, but you just had to struggle."
Seeing Shirou get up and stagger toward the shed, Lancer sighed and raised his spear to finish things once and for all.
But just then, something shot out from behind him—a tree branch that coiled tightly around his right ankle.
Before he could react, his entire body was yanked upside-down and smashed brutally into the ground.
"Boom! Boom! Boom!"
Hearing the commotion, Shirou halted midway and turned back. His expression shifted from anger to stunned disbelief.
"Did… did the tree become a spirit?!"
He saw the once-dead maple tree his foster father had planted.
Now it was tall and lush again, its thick branches wrapped around his pursuer and smashing him into the ground repeatedly.
The arrogant youth from moments ago was now coughing up blood.
"Who dares ambush me?!"
After being slammed a dozen times, Lancer finally regained control. His spear flared red as he slashed apart the binding branches, flipping to the ground and scanning his surroundings.
Unlike Shirou, he didn't think the tree had awakened.
He assumed some nearby magus skilled in plant magecraft had manipulated the tree to attack him.
"Lancer, you're having a streak of bad luck crossing paths with me.
Though that spear of yours is quite interesting."
George shifted from tree form to human form, eyeing the crimson spear with keen interest.
He had only casually extended a few small branches earlier, but given his physique, those branches were far sturdier than common steel.
For Lancer's spear to cut through them so easily, it was clearly no ordinary magical weapon.
(End of this chapter)