wrapping up his reunion with his old friend, Matou Shinji walked out feeling more than just comfortable familiarity.
His friendship with Emiya Shirou had always included a genuine current of admiration alongside the easy rapport. The great fire that had consumed Fuyuki City ten years ago had taken everything from Emiya Shirou in a single night, family and home alike. But among all the survivors, Shirou had been remarkably resilient, shaking off the pain and despair faster than anyone and never letting his traumatic childhood make him bitter. If anything, his sense of justice only became more striking by contrast.
When Shinji had learned about Shirou's past during middle school, he had tried to imagine himself in that position. What would he do if he faced the same hopelessness? The most optimistic outcome he could picture was becoming some miserable, self-pitying wreck who resented the whole world.
Then again, he was already kind of a wreck now. In pursuit of magecraft, he had long since gotten blood on his hands.
During his three years abroad, he had been a beggar, a highland adventurer, a lone wandering traveler.
But mostly, he had been a mercenary contracted through a mercenary guild and a network hacker, because those were the two professions most likely to bring him into direct contact with the hidden world of magecraft.
He may have had no talent for magecraft itself, but for everything else, he seemed to have unexpected aptitude. In just the half-year he had spent living in Kyiv, he had taught himself the fundamentals of modern computing and emerged as a fledgling hacker.
Most rumors about miracles he tracked down through the network turned out to be fabrications, though it was true that the mercenary guild and the Mage's Association had some kind of ambiguous relationship nobody talked about openly.
The next two-plus years were spent steadily climbing through the mercenary guild's ranks.
From not being able to kill so much as a chicken, to accepting assassination contracts against military warlords in the Middle East without flinching. Just two years.
It was almost funny. Maybe someone noticed he had potential, a faint echo of that legendary mage-killer who no one could put a name to. Eventually he got assigned a contract to kill a mage, and it was that mission that reminded a confident Shinji, all over again, what it felt like to be completely powerless against something transcendent.
Sixteen of them went in. Only he came out alive.
They had been sent as test subjects for the mage's new bounded field, nothing but disposable cannon fodder. He had only survived because the silver-thread familiar specimen he carried had taken the killing blow for him, giving him the opening to play dead and counter-kill the arrogant mage.
"How is this possible?! A familiar of that caliber?! You're nothing but an ordinary human, no magic aptitude, no Magic Circuits, so how could you possibly have..."
Those had been the mage's last words.
After that fight, he had lost one arm and both legs, suffered massive internal hemorrhaging across his vital organs, and walked away with the mage's entire collection of artifacts and a substantial sum of money.
In the end, he had turned himself into this thing he was now, more ghost than human, someone who had to wear thick clothing even in front of Emiya Shirou. A walking reminder of Matou Kariya from ten years ago.
"Magecraft. That's what magecraft is. Only a mage can stand against a mage..."
The sunset over Fuyuki was warm and inviting, and Shinji walked along the busy coastal road, murmuring to himself as his hand drifted to the empty case at his chest pocket. That silver-thread familiar had dissolved into magical mist after saving his life, and the experience had only deepened his conviction that only a mage was entitled to create miracles.
Fame, wealth, beauty. All of it was hollow. Only magecraft was the true substance of this world. A single casual gift from a mage had saved his life. Had let him, in turn, kill a mage whose craft was inferior to that benefactor's.
It made him hunger for magecraft even more. Borderline obsessively. Who cared who the Matou family's assets went to? He only wanted the all-capable wishing machine to rewrite his hopeless inability to use magecraft.
Of course, he didn't know this yet, but the silver-thread familiars that belonged to Illyasviel were little more than a tickle to a Servant. Against ordinary mages, however, they were an absolute massacre. It had nothing to do with magical proficiency. It was a pure difference in mystery's density bearing down on them.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
As Matou Shinji walked, still lost in thought, the bustle of the coastal road slowly thinned. The people on the beach seemed to collectively snap out of something and begin packing up, heading home as if by instinct.
Without warning, something stirred beneath the soft sand. A vibration. A rolling, churning movement.
Then came the sound of wings. Hideous insects drilling up out of the earth, unfurling wet wings.
"...A dispersal spell? Clearing out bystanders?"
Both hands stayed in his pockets. The blue-haired boy in the hoodie didn't panic. He simply looked at the several enormous insects that had surrounded him, each one large enough to swallow a bull whole, then reached into his pocket and slipped on a thermal monocle.
"Of all the people to notice I'd come back. I didn't expect it to be you instead of Sakura."
Then he moved.
A single lunge, explosive and immediate. Both pistols cleared his holsters in less than two seconds, locking on every insect in the circle with perfect precision. He pulled the triggers.
Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang.
Green ichor splattered in every direction. The insects, which should have shrugged off ordinary bullets, detonated the instant the rounds touched them. From the inside out, like a volcano heated past its breaking point, they burst into fragments.
How?
A handgun? Just a handgun was enough to hurt these insect familiars? Even if these weren't the attacker's highest-tier insects, something like this shouldn't be physically killable...
"Heh-heh. 'Hacker Mercenary.' Looks like that title of yours is no exaggeration. Combining modern weapons with magecraft, inscribing purification sigils from the Holy Church onto the bullets?"
"But it's a cheap trick. Useless against mages of the five great elements."
Honestly, useless against most mages in general. It couldn't pierce the magical defense generated by an active Magic Circuit. Good only for ambushes, or picking off weak familiars that didn't use magecraft to defend themselves.
Matou Shinji showed no pride at the observation, because he knew it himself. His innovation, in the eyes of most mages and even his own, was a deviation from first principles. Combining noble magecraft with the vulgar machinery of the modern world and calling it some new contemporary method, he would blush just thinking about it.
The generous framing: he was a hacker mercenary.
The honest framing: he was a heretic in the eyes of every traditional mage.
"No need for modesty. Among the participants of this Holy Grail War that this old man is aware of, you are among the top tier in raw combat capability. Solidly in the upper ranks of Masters."
A hunched figure emerged from the dark alley, leaning on a cane, slowly taking shape in the shadows.
Matou Shinji's methods were admittedly unorthodox. Mages traditionally despised modern technology, and here was this one trying to fuse it with magecraft. But there was no denying he had developed real combat power, considerably more than Matou Sakura, who hadn't seen much actual bloodshed.
Not a gap in magical skill. Simply the difference between a person who had learned what it meant to go for the throat and a person who hadn't. From Zouken's perspective, this young man wasn't going to live past twenty-five if he kept this up. More life-draining than even the crest worms.
"There's no official confirmation of who the Grail has selected yet. And you're this sure I'll be chosen, old man?"
"Ha-ha-ha-ha. You've already killed most of the outside mages who arrived in Fuyuki City. If the Grail somehow still doesn't pick you, you'll just go and steal the Command Seals off whatever lucky stranger it does pick, won't you?"
"..."
Matou Shinji said nothing. He put away both guns and narrowed his eyes, neither confirming nor denying.
So this old thing still had his fingers in the Matou family's affairs. His intelligence was more precise than even Sakura's. Because even Sakura and his father Tsuruno didn't know he had already returned to Fuyuki, or that he had been using hacker methods to identify every mage in the city who could rival the Three Families, the Church, or the Clock Tower, and quietly eliminating them one by one.
The five fixed participants were given. The remaining slots would be filled by whoever the Grail selected from within Fuyuki City. And if he was the only candidate left standing in Fuyuki, then combined with the other cards he held, securing a participant's slot would be a foregone conclusion.
"Fast three years without seeing you and you're still the same revolting creature, old man."
Especially that surveillance. It made even his own hacking look clean by comparison.
At least he was just looking up names from a database. This one had a complete real-time picture of everything moving in Fuyuki.
"Without the financial support this old man gave you, and the connections that pointed you toward the mercenary guild, do you think you'd even be alive right now? Grown up enough to bare your teeth at your grandfather? On the strength of those pathetic 'modern magecraft' toys of yours?"
Matou Zouken let out a thin, wheezing chuckle. He prided himself on the credit he deserved for this young man's growth. If not for the early financial backing and, most importantly, the tip about the mercenary guild's existence, this boy would never have become what he was.
Naturally, at the time, the support hadn't been out of affection. He had simply been irritated with Shinji, the same way he had been irritated with Tsuruno, and had wanted to watch the boy stumble through the world and die in humiliation.
He had expected the boy to break.
He hadn't.
The Middle East, Myanmar, the Golden Triangle, and finally the assassination contract against a mage: none of it had finished him.
Where Tsuruno had a little magical talent but nothing else of note, Shinji seemed to have talent for everything except magecraft. It was as if the heavens had redistributed the talent completely incorrectly: no talent for magecraft in someone who wanted it desperately, talent for everything else in someone who only wanted magecraft.
Even Zouken didn't know how to evaluate that.
"So what you're saying is, I'm supposed to be grateful to you? Grateful to someone who treated me as a toy the same way you treated Kariya?"
Matou Shinji let out a cold laugh and produced a red vial from his pocket. His voice held not a trace of respect or gratitude.
The easy teasing he showed around Emiya Shirou was gone entirely. He was something closer to a demon now.
"Go ahead and test whether I'll fight back, old man. Do you think I have soft spots like Kariya did? If it weren't for the fact that you're my grandfather, you would have been in the ground from the moment you said hello."
He wasn't suffering from Stockholm syndrome. He was alive because of his obsession with magecraft, because of the ideal that had kept pulling him back from the edge every time he was about to quit. Not because of this old man's dusty connections.
Everything Zouken had given him, he could have found with his hacking anyway. Everything Zouken couldn't give him, he had bought with mercenary earnings. He owed nothing.
He wasn't a good person. Outside of Emiya Shirou, anyone who picked a fight with him would find their whole family buried.
"Thaumaturgical Marrow... heh, you came prepared."
With over five hundred years of perspective, Zouken recognized immediately what the liquid in Shinji's hand was. It was a spiritual drug capable of temporarily simulating Magic Circuits within an ordinary person's body. Injected into the spinal column, it could produce a facsimile of magical ability for a few minutes.
The cost was severe damage to the body, and it only lasted a very short time.
The Clock Tower sold it to wealthy non-mages as an expensive novelty, something for the rich to dabble in.
But unlike a layperson with no magecraft lineage, Shinji still carried the Matou family's accumulated knowledge in his head. Even without the bloodline's circuit inheritance, that knowledge combined with the Marrow could produce formidable fighting power.
As a great mage, Zouken naturally didn't fear some eccentric young man with no proper magical ability. But Shinji still had some value at the moment. No reason to waste a decent piece on the board.
"The Fifth Holy Grail War is almost upon us. I have an intelligence network covering all of Fuyuki City."
"I have already confirmed most of the participant roster for this war. I know their movements, and I know what catalysts they hold. For someone in your line of work, you should understand what that means, coming from a mage of genuine depth."
A dragon in its territory is still outmatched by the local snake.
Shinji's hacking was effective in the outside world, but in Fuyuki City's enclosed magical environment it was essentially blind. Once the Holy Grail War began, no amount of skill would get him real-time intelligence on every party.
And in a war where one step of delay meant being a step behind forever, the Fourth Holy Grail War had already proven that the Holy Grail War was a new edition every day. Even the "strongest class" of Saber meant nothing if your information was stale.
"What do you want?"
Shinji didn't agree immediately. He pocketed the vial and probed cautiously.
"As this old man understands it, the Clock Tower has already purchased the catalyst for the Age of Gods mage, Medea."
"What...!"
"Heh-heh. You guessed right. That Servant who killed seven in the Fourth Holy Grail War. The Servant Killer. The Age of Gods mage Medea, whom you met once as a child. She will appear in this Holy Grail War in Fuyuki, and she will become the absolute threat hunting every other Master and Servant."
The Servant Killer. The Age of Gods mage, Medea.
Shinji knew that name well. She was the one who had given him his initial revelation, in the same way that the Winter Saint had wrecked Zouken's plans so long ago.
But that was ancient history. If the Fifth Holy Grail War brought him face to face with Medea, they would simply be enemies. And he was clear-eyed enough to know that in that scenario, he was almost certainly the one who would die.
"Medea again. That's terrifying."
Shinji muttered under his breath, a trace of lingering dread in his voice. No one could defeat that mage at her full power.
Yes, technically the Fourth Holy Grail War had ended in the Lancer's victory. But anyone with any inside knowledge knew the truth: Medea had been the real king without a crown. It wasn't that she couldn't win. Her Master had simply been a ghost throughout the entire war.
Had the man ever contributed even a fraction of his effort, a perfect hexagonal Servant like Medea would never have gone out the way she did.
"Medea likely has an extraordinary capacity to learn and improve. My assessment is that her invocation ability is the type that refines itself by observing the Holy Grail War's progression. The closer to the war's end, the stronger she becomes as she fully understands the ritual. Her only real window of vulnerability is the early stage. Killing her early is the only exploitable weakness."
Matou Zouken tapped his cane and continued.
"To win the Holy Grail War, Medea is the primary obstacle."
"But if we still cannot overcome Medea in the early stage, her Master is the second solution."
"Cooperating with this old man to capture Medea's Master alive is not without benefit to you. After all, I am still Matou family. I naturally wish for the victor's seat in this Holy Grail War to be claimed by one of our blood."
Matou Zouken made this sound deeply principled, like a benevolent elder.
Shinji didn't believe a word of it, of course. But he nodded slowly regardless.
Because one thing was correct: Medea had to be countered aggressively.
And while Medea herself might be unsolvable, her Master wasn't.
(I can't beat you directly. But I can still beat your Master, can't I? You might be unbeatable. But is your Master?)
"An alliance? Sure. Anyone with even partial knowledge of what happened last time isn't going to be foolish enough to think Medea can be dealt with solo."
"The Tohsaka family, the Matou family, the Einzbern family. The Three Founding Families' Servants were all cut down by her single-handedly. She shattered every piece of our pride."
You thought you could handle Medea alone? The Fourth Holy Grail War's Tohsaka Tokiomi thought so. Matou Kariya thought so. Emiya Kiritsugu thought so. Two of the Three Knights and one stat-monster Berserker all got thoroughly dismantled.
"But I'm curious. If you want to counter Medea, old man, why not cooperate with the current Matou family head instead of me?"
Shinji raised the question.
Between him and a Clock Tower genius like Matou Sakura, she was obviously the stronger candidate for a partner.
"Heh-heh. Then why don't you go form an alliance with Matou Sakura yourself? Your father is her right-hand man now, you know."
At that, Zouken's reply came with a mocking edge. In a sense, the Matou family had already split into two camps: the Family Head faction behind Sakura, and the Old Guard faction whose power still derived from Zouken's long shadow.
The Matou main family was small in number, but the ordinary people employed under the family's various ventures were considerable. Every business had to have staff.
"If you agree, sign this Self-Geis Scroll."
"This old man will provide intelligence and what assistance is possible, working together to capture Medea's Master alive. Once that is done, I will not interfere in whatever transpires between you and Sakura."
A yellowed sheet of paper was thrown out. Shinji reached out and caught it.
A Self-Geis Scroll. A contract binding in the world of mages.
"Who is Sakura summoning?"
After a quick scan of the terms, finding no obvious loopholes, Shinji asked offhandedly.
The terms were simple: a joint operation targeting Medea. Since it was uncertain whether Medea possessed the ability to act independently even for a short time, and whether a desperate all-or-nothing clash with her was viable, the strategy was to capture Medea's Master alive and use the binding of Command Seals to force a complete withdrawal.
That second part was, of course, an annotation rather than a binding clause. The contract specified nothing about what to actually do with the Master once captured.
"This old man doesn't know exactly. That girl is cautious. The catalyst shipments were deliberately fragmented across different couriers, routes crossed and switched. I can only give you a rough range."
"...How rough?"
"Greek mythology. European relics. Reportedly from the Age of Gods, connected to something monstrous."
"And the others? Tohsaka, Einzbern, the Church?"
"Einzbern is also Greek mythology related. Tohsaka has not purchased any catalyst yet, so they will likely be doing an affinity summon. The Church's route is unknown. They have their own private shipping channels that even this old man cannot penetrate."
Why was everyone in the Greek mythology pool?
Couldn't find Medea's catalyst, so you're all going for Greek Servants because she's from there? Was that it?
"That tells me nothing I couldn't have guessed. Everyone with any knowledge of last time knows Greek mythology catalysts would be in high demand this cycle because of her."
Shinji was mildly unsatisfied. And partly trying to push the price higher.
Seven participants. Three confirmed to be Greek mythology related. That was roughly what he had expected. No explosive revelation here.
"Heh-heh. Don't get too greedy, young one."
Zouken let out an amused little cackle.
"Then let me add one more piece of information. Be careful with that close friend of yours, Emiya Shirou."
"His relationship with the Einzbern family is not trivial. I understand he has inherited the Magic Crest of his foster father, the magus-killer."