"Director, do you actually need a Servant for backup?"
As if she'd heard something incredibly strange, Ana stared at the young man before her with those lovely pink eyes of hers.
It was an undeniable fact that Heroic Spirits were on a completely different level than mere mortals.
A Heroic Spirit is an existence born from a hero whose great deeds became legend after their death, transforming them into an object of faith—a being that can only be summoned by the World itself. These figures, worshiped like gods, are naturally overflowing with presence. Given a sufficiently powerful spiritual foundation, the best of them could pin a good number of actual deities to the ground and beat them senseless.
A classic example is Heracles, who helped the Olympian gods (after they'd shed their mechanical bodies) defeat the Titans, who were essentially alien machine gods. (Prime Heracles was an absolute unit).
Then you have the Moon World's hardest-working employee, Gilgamesh. In his prime, assuming he didn't care about his kingdom, he could use his signature Ea-swordplay and his special brand of Enkidu S&M to beat so many gods that their own mothers wouldn't recognize them.
It was the same for heroes like Karna, the Hero of Charity; Ramses II, the human incarnation of the sun god; and Arjuna, the divinely gifted hero.
(Side note: Arjuna's life was pretty miserable. He had several times more weapons than Karna, but they all came with usage restrictions that always failed him at the most critical moments. He was also cursed by a whole pantheon of gods, making his later years tragically bleak.)
However—
What humans summon are Servants.
They are not full-fledged Heroic Spirits, and certainly not Heroic Spirits wielding the entirety of their original power.
For heroes from the Common Era, being summoned as a Servant is actually an upgrade; they were relatively weak to begin with, so the Saint Graph container is a net positive. But for the absolute powerhouses from the Age of Gods, being summoned as a Servant is an exercise in suffering. How could that pitiful spiritual container possibly hold all of their might? The scale is simply insufficient!
Could a legendary hero, unable to unleash their full potential, truly be of any use to the Director now?
Miss Ana, who remembered some of this useless trivia from the many times Li Zihan had kissed her under the pretext of "imparting knowledge," was a little confused.
"I'm summoning Archer," the boy, who was in fact planning to summon Kuro, lied smoothly. "He's a budget Gilgamesh who can use a Reality Marble to instantly section off the battlefield."
The boy, who honestly had been planning to summon Archer at first, continued his explanation.
"We'll likely have a fight soon in the Netherworld—a realm that is neither life nor death."
"In that place, the physical world is shaped by the mind, allowing everyone to teleport at will. Hunting an enemy in such an environment is extremely difficult."
The God of Steel known as Susanoo was hiding there.
Drawing on the Emiya family's hereditary magecraft, which inherently involved cutting spaces off from the world, the boy's argument sounded perfectly logical.
"I need a partner who can deploy a Reality Marble and lock him down."
"And Archer, Emiya Shirou, is one of the very few Heroic Spirits capable of deploying one."
Emiya Shirou. That sounded like a boy's name. Both Ana and Sirin visibly relaxed.
"So, that bullet is the catalyst?" Sirin asked, pointing at it. Having spent so much time with Li Zihan, she had absorbed some of the basics of magecraft.
"It's a Conceptual Weapon made from the ashes of Emiya Shirou's adoptive father, Emiya Kiritsugu. As a catalyst, the probability of summoning Shirou is very high."
Of course—
It was only a high probability.
With his Clairvoyance active, Li Zihan had clearly seen futures where he summoned Emiya Kiritsugu himself, Illya, Kuro, Alter Emiya, and even his wife, Irisviel.
The entire Emiya clan was truly a house of martyrs.
"Well, let's get started, Director," said Miss Ana. She was also curious to see what a spirit summoning ritual actually looked like, her eyes fixed on the mysterious, intricate pattern drawn on the floor.
"Of course." The boy, whose entire goal was to summon his "partner" in front of Ana and Sirin, smiled faintly. Then, under their expectant gazes, he placed his hand on the summoning circle.
"Let your body rest under my command, let my fate rest in your sword. Heeding the call of the Grail, if you will bow to this will and reason, then answer my summons."
A heavily truncated version of the summoning chant left the boy's lips.
And then—
As Sirin and Ana stared in dumbfounded shock, a petite girl stepped out from the light.
She wore something akin to a swimsuit, over which was draped a red holy shroud. Across her exposed abdomen was a very provocative red pattern.
As there was no chance of an accident—with his Clairvoyance cheat allowing him to select his desired outcome—the one who appeared was, of course, Kuro.
"Oh my, it seems quite lively in here," Kuro remarked, her amber eyes scanning her surroundings, clearly noting the extra company.
"Y-You're... Emiya Shirou?" Miss Ana stammered, feeling as though she'd just been hit over the head with an iron bar.
"The name's Chloe von Einzbern. Or you can call me Chloe Emiya," the girl chirped with a grin. She was the being born after Emiya Shirou, fearing for his family's safety, left his power within Illya before returning to the Throne of Heroes.
"On a spiritual level, since I inherited the power of my little brother from another timeline, I guess I really am Emiya Shirou," she explained with a smile, delivering a strange paradox. "I am Emiya Shirou, but Emiya Shirou is not me."
What in the world was happening? A deeply shaken Sirin looked from the girl to the boy, whose hand now bore Command Spells with a pattern identical to the one on the girl's stomach. She found him wearing an expression of pure, unadulterated shock.
Even A-Li didn't see this coming? How rare.
The last time she'd seen Li Zihan look so utterly stunned, Sirin recalled, was when he was eating her Heavenly Fire Cuisine.
Next time A-Li makes me mad, I'll just force-feed him some of my Heavenly Fire Cuisine.
Having long since accepted her own lack of culinary talent, Miss Sirin mentally filed "Heavenly Fire Cuisine" under her list of approved punishments for cheating boyfriends.
"Ehhh? Big Brother, why are you spacing out?"
"A dazed Big Brother... it's a weird look for you," the girl, who was in fact meeting him for the second time, licked her lips as she studied the still red-eyed and seemingly stunned boy.
He really is completely different from the guy he'll become.
But whether he was dazed or not didn't matter. Noticing two other very familiar figures on the side, a smile bloomed on the girl's face.
She skipped lightly over to her Master for this summoning.
"You're the Master, right? After summoning a Servant, aren't you supposed to... replenish her mana?"
Before the bewildered and stunned eyes of Sirin and Ana, the petite girl rose onto her tiptoes.
And then—
She bit down on their lover's lips.
The kiss was heated, and full of passion.
---o---