The thing about Magic Circuits is that they don't feel like power.
They feel like someone took a set of neon tubes, threaded them through your spine and ribcage and the meat behind your eyes, and then left the installation instructions in a language you're still learning. When they're dormant, you don't notice them. When they're active, you notice nothing else.
Haruki had twenty-seven.
He'd counted them the first time at seventeen, sitting in this same basement, following a breathing exercise from a manuscript he'd translated himself from a water-damaged copy of Barthomeloi's Introductory Meditations on the Internal Architecture. He'd been so relieved to find anything at all that it had taken him another week to understand what twenty-seven actually meant in the broader context. He'd looked it up. He'd run the numbers.
For reference: Rin Tohsaka had forty.
He was, in the technical parlance of the Association's unofficial registry, a Third-Rate Magus. In his own internal parlance, formed somewhere around the fourteenth month of pushing his body past what twenty-seven circuits were rated to handle, he had arrived at a more precise formulation.
Third-Rate Magus. First-Rate death wish.
The circuits were all open now — all twenty-seven, lit to the edge of their tolerance, which was not a state any responsible teacher would endorse and which felt, from the inside, like swallowing a fluorescent light. His hands were braced flat against the cold concrete floor. His vision had gone to that particular shade of washed-out white that preceded either a breakthrough or a nosebleed, and the odds at this point were running roughly even.
He breathed. Counted. Pulled back from the edge by about three percent.
Not yet.
The basement was not what anyone would call a Thaumaturgy workshop. It was approximately twelve feet by fourteen feet of poured concrete, a water heater he'd long since drained and repurposed as a storage unit for his more volatile reagents, three folding tables arranged in an L-shape under the kind of lighting you buy at a hardware store, and approximately eleven months of accumulated preparation stacked on every available surface. Grimoires next to energy drink cans. A laminated printout of the Greater Fuyuki ley line map thumbtacked above a whiteboard dense with formula notation. A half-dismantled circuit board from a desktop computer he'd been using to model bounded field geometry before he realized the metaphor had limits.
The walls were covered in runes.
Not elegant runes. Not the clean workshop carvings of a proper Magus family, executed by someone who'd trained in their craft since childhood and had the architectural background to make magical infrastructure look like it belonged in the space. These were functional runes, inscribed with a die grinder he'd bought from a construction supply store, based on a derivation system he'd worked out himself over six months of cross-referencing three separate translation traditions. They worked because he'd made them work through approximately two hundred iterations of not working.
They looked like the inside of a server room designed by someone having a crisis.
On the central folding table, the summoning circle was complete.
It had taken him four months to inscribe, which was embarrassing if you thought about it and entirely reasonable if you thought about it harder. He'd had to source the chalk compound himself — standard chalk wouldn't hold the formula geometry through a sustained ritual, but the Association-grade alternative cost more than he'd made in the prior year and required a supplier relationship he didn't have. His solution had involved three mineral suppliers, a chemistry degree's worth of pH testing, and a binder compound he'd ultimately derived from a throwaway footnote in a secondary source on Mesopotamian ritual architecture. It worked. He was fairly certain it worked. He was about to find out definitively.
The clock in the corner of his phone screen read 2:07 AM.
He picked up the phone. Put it face-down. Picked it up again.
The Fifth Holy Grail War begins on the winter solstice.
He'd read it approximately four hundred times. In Nasu's original text, in the fan translations, in the secondary analyses and the timeline reconstruction threads and the single most exhaustive route comparison document he'd ever encountered, which had been written in 2009 by a Finnish forum user and remained, in his professional opinion, the definitive structural analysis of the work. He knew the timeline the way a musician knows a piece they've played until their fingers can find the notes without the lights on.
Tonight was the night.
Which meant that somewhere in Fuyuki, right now, six other people were performing six other summoning rituals. Emiya Kiritsugu's Avalon was calling to something across the Throne of Heroes. Rin Tohsaka was in her workshop with a catalyst she'd almost lost, trusting in her own luck in a way that would pay off exactly as much as it deserved to. The Matou heir was in a basement he didn't want to think about too hard, bound to a Servant whose nature he knew and whose implications he'd spent three years trying to figure out how to interrupt. Kuzuki Souichirou was being handed something he didn't understand and would handle with the blunt competence of a man who approaches every situation as if it can be solved through better positioning. Bazett Fraga McRemitz was about to be betrayed by someone she trusted, which was a variable he'd identified early and filed under unavoidable unless I want to make a new problem.
And Zouken Matou was somewhere, doing something, in the way that things left in the dark for long enough stop needing to be anywhere specific and simply are.
Seven Masters. Seven Servants. That was the structure. That was the script.
He was not summoning a King.
This was the thing he was proudest of and most uncertain about in roughly equal measure: he had spent eleven months deriving a summoning modification that should, theoretically, bias the ritual's Servant selection toward the Assassin class. Not fix it to Assassin — that was beyond what his technical toolkit could achieve, and he was self-aware enough not to build a plan around miracles he couldn't engineer. But bias it. Nudge the resonance parameters in a direction that would favor a Servant with lower baseline prana consumption, a smaller spiritual container, a combat profile that worked better at low supply.
The logic was simple. He couldn't sustain a Saber or a Lancer or a Berserker. Their mana overhead would drain him in days, maybe less. He was a AA battery who'd volunteered for a job that specified industrial power supply, and the only way to survive that discrepancy was to need less power from the start.
An Assassin was survivable. An Assassin was a Servant he could actually maintain.
He'd derived the modification from a combination of three sources: a fragment of Barthomeloi's classification theory, a secondary reading of the Einzbern summoning documentation that had been partially reconstructed from a 2004 doujin which had itself been based on materials he had no way to verify, and his own eleven months of practical experience pushing a Third-Rate circuit set past the edge of its rated capacity.
He was, by any objective measure, not qualified to modify the fundamental architecture of a ritual that had been designed by some of the most advanced magical theorists of the last two centuries.
He was also the only person who knew the war was coming, which he'd decided was worth something.
Third-Rate Magus. First-Rate delusion.
He stood up. His knees protested. He ignored them, because they always protested now, and if he started listening to his knees he'd have to listen to his back and then his hands and then the three ribs on his left side that hadn't healed entirely correctly after the incident with the containment failure in March, and that was a conversation with his own body he didn't have time for tonight.
The summoning circle was complete. The catalyst was in place at the circle's northern vertex: a piece of iron, barely larger than a coin, that had come to him through a chain of transactions he'd rather not reconstruct in detail. It was not the piece he'd wanted. It was a compromise, a fallback, a this will have to do after the piece he'd wanted had turned out to be both extant and prohibitively expensive and currently in the possession of someone who was absolutely not selling.
It resonated, faintly, with something old. Something that had seen a war and survived it.
He'd stress-tested the resonance a dozen times. It was stable. It was coherent. It pointed in the right direction.
He took his position at the southern edge of the circle.
Opened his circuits.
All twenty-seven, together, in sequence — a procedure he'd drilled until he could execute it in under four seconds, because there were situations where four seconds was the difference between alive and not. The sensation was what it always was: the fluorescent light, the spine, the space behind his eyes going briefly white. His Od welled up and began to flow into the formula geometry inscribed on the floor, and the chalk compound he'd spent six months developing caught it and held, channeling the flow along pathways that had taken four months to inscribe correctly.
The circle began to glow.
Not brightly, not yet. A baseline luminescence — the ritual coming online, the formula confirming structural integrity, the metaphysical infrastructure of the summoning engaging with the metaphysical infrastructure of the world and beginning the slow, grinding process of negotiation. Requesting access. Filing the claim. One Servant, one contract, Heroic Spirit of the Assassin class if available, on behalf of this Magus at this location at this time.
The air changed.
He'd felt it described a hundred times and felt it himself never, and the description had not adequately prepared him for the *texture* of it. Not temperature — or not only temperature. Something more fundamental than temperature. The sense of the world noticing, the way a room full of people will turn when someone enters, except in this case the room was three feet of air and the people were the Alaya and it was turning toward him with the unhurried attention of something that had been watching since before attention was invented.
There you are, it didn't say, not in words, not in anything as organized as meaning. It said it in the way the air moved and the way the chalk light deepened from soft gold toward something with more weight.
He exhaled. Stayed steady.
I know. He didn't say this either. I know you see me. I know what you are. I know that you're the aggregate defensive mechanism of human civilization and that you view anyone who steps far enough outside normal causality as a potential threat to be managed. I know all of that, and I'm asking you, very respectfully, to let me do this one thing.
The Alaya did not respond to respectful requests. He knew that too. He began to speak.
---
"Silver and iron to the origin."
The formula had a rhythm. He'd read it recited in translations, had heard the cadences reconstructed from critical analysis, had practiced it until the syllables were automatic. It was not meant to be beautiful, not primarily — it was meant to be precise, a series of conceptual locks turning in sequence, each line establishing a new layer of the metaphysical structure.
"Stone and the Archduke of Contracts to the foundation."
His Od was flowing steadily now. The circle was at full luminescence, a steady gold that cast sharp shadows across the rune-covered walls. On the table to his left, the half-empty energy drink can caught the light and threw it back at him, and he thought, briefly and with considerable feeling, that this was an extremely unglamorous way to participate in a Holy Grail War.
"Ancestor is my great master, Schweinorg."
Third line. Seventh syllable. All nominal.
"The alighted wind becomes a wall."
The air pressure in the basement shifted — a sensation like the moment before a storm breaks, compressed potential, the formula structure reaching the point where it had drawn enough ambient prana to become self-sustaining. He was no longer doing all the work. The ritual was pulling now, and his role had shifted from initiator to anchor: his Od the fixed point around which the summoning structure organized itself.
"The gates in the four directions close, coming from the crown, the three-forked road from the kingdom leads to the Castle of Denial."
He was at the midpoint. Everything was nominal. The modification he'd introduced was in the formula's resonance layer, invisible at this stage, a quiet adjustment that would guide the Throne's response when the structure finalized. He couldn't see it, but he could feel it — the slight asymmetry in the prana flow, the way the circle's harmonic was a half-frequency lower than it should have been, the specific skew toward smaller spiritual containers that he'd spent six months engineering.
Steady. He was at the eleventh syllable.
"I hereby declare—"
The twelfth.
"Your body shall serve under me—"
The thirteenth.
He took the breath. Opened his mouth.
And the catalyst sang.
Not aloud. Not in any frequency that vibrated air. It sang in the space between metaphysical concepts, in the register where iron that had touched something legendary still remembered the shape of that legend, and what it remembered was not small. What it remembered was not low-cost. What it remembered was—
The iron fragment, which had come to him through a chain of transactions and had tested stable and had pointed in what he'd assessed as the right direction, had not been lying. It had simply been pointing at two things simultaneously, and the summoning structure, in the process of finalizing resonance, had found both of them.
The fourteenth syllable.
His mouth was open. The word was in his lungs. He had approximately a quarter of a second to abort the ritual, which was not enough time, because aborting a summoning at the fourteenth syllable required a specific counter-formula that he'd prepared for every contingency he'd thought to anticipate and had not thought to anticipate this.
In his mind — in the space where he'd built his reconstruction of the script, the timeline, the branching logic of every route he'd studied until the decision trees were as familiar as his own apartment — something that felt exactly like paper caught fire.
He said the fourteenth syllable.
---
The circle did not glow gold.
It bled.
The formula geometry fractured along its resonance lines and the fractures filled with light that was not the clean gold of a functioning ritual but something wrong — something static-edged and deeply, viscerally crimson, the color of a signal interrupted, of data transmission through a damaged line. The chalk he'd spent six months developing, which he'd stress-tested through fifty calibration rituals, began to crack. The cracks spread outward from the central vertex in geometric patterns that matched no structure he'd designed.
He hit the concrete floor as the first pillar of light erupted, because his body made that decision before his mind did and his body was occasionally smarter than his mind. The pressure wave hit him half a second later and drove the air out of his lungs. From the floor, face angled toward the summoning circle, he watched the ritual do something it was not supposed to do.
Two. Two separate columns of light, rising from a circle designed for one. They were distinct — differentiated by frequency, by harmonic, by the specific quality of prana they displaced — and between them the circle's geometry was tearing itself apart trying to reconcile a structural equation that had two answers where it expected one. The cracks reached the walls. The rune inscriptions he'd spent eleven months developing began to flare and die in sequence, overloaded, circuit-broken by a mana expenditure two orders of magnitude beyond their rated capacity.
The water heater fell over.
The fluorescent light above him blew out.
The two columns of light did not care about any of this. They were completing. They were resolving. The Throne of Heroes, petitioned twice in the same ritual structure by a catalyst with two resonant frequencies, had answered twice, and the structure that had been designed for one answer was doing its best, in the way that structures do when asked to contain more than they were built for.
Something in the foundation cracked. He felt it through the floor.
Then the light faded.
---
The basement was very quiet.
His nose was bleeding. Both nostrils, which was new — usually it was just the left. He could feel a warmth at his right ear that suggested the same situation. His Od was not depleted; it was something worse than depleted, which was stretched, extended into two separate tethers that were pulling in two separate directions and that his twenty-seven circuits were currently attempting to sustain with the structural integrity of a rope bridge in a hurricane.
He became aware, slowly, of presences.
Two of them. Distinct. Enormous, in the way that Heroic Spirits were enormous — not in physical space, which they occupied normally enough, but in metaphysical weight, in the sense of *accumulated meaning that a soul accumulates over centuries of being remembered and worshipped and called upon. Standing in his basement under his blown-out fluorescent light, they were like two stone pillars in a space sized for one, and the space was making accommodations it found uncomfortable.
He pushed himself to his knees. Then to his feet. One of the folding tables had been overturned; he didn't remember that happening, but there was a red line across his forearm suggesting it had happened to him specifically. He ignored it. He looked up.
On his left: blue and silver, standing where the light had been and carrying its own now — not magical light, not prana luminescence, but the quiet authority of something that had stood in worse places than this and intended to keep standing. A woman who looked young in the way that kings look young in portraits, which was to say not young at all. Her armor was immaculate in the way that things maintained by Magecraft are immaculate, regardless of what they've been through. Her eyes were the color of shallow water over glass, and they were conducting a tactical assessment of the room with the speed and thoroughness of someone who did this automatically, the way other people breathe.
Her left hand rested on the hilt of a sword he couldn't see. He knew what that meant. He'd read about that specifically.
On his right: still. The wrong kind of still — not the stillness of someone at rest, but the stillness of something that had decided stillness was tactically appropriate and could end that decision in approximately a quarter of a second. Violet hair, long enough to pool, though she wasn't sitting. She was in a position that looked like standing but was organized more like crouching, weight distributed for movement in any direction, chains hanging from her hands without tension in the way that chains hang when the person holding them is comfortable with their weight. A blindfold was hanging loose around her neck, not in use. Her eyes were open.
He'd read about those eyes too. He'd chosen, reading about them, not to think too hard about what they looked like. He thought about it now, briefly and involuntarily, and then redirected.
His right hand was burning.
He looked down at it. The Command Seal that had begun to form at the ritual's initiation — the Grail's mark of recognition, the formal binding of Master and Servant — had split. Where there should have been one complete Seal, there were two interlocking geometries, each occupying half the space, each incomplete, a fracture line running between them where the design had tried to reconcile two contracts in the physical space allocated for one. They were both active. They were both burning, in the low steady way that Seals burned when they were under load.
He was sustaining two Servants.
He did the math, automatically, in the part of his brain that ran calculations independent of whether he wanted the results. His Od reserve versus the baseline prana consumption of two Top-Tier Servants. He ran the numbers twice because the first result seemed excessive.
The second result matched the first.
He had, at the current rate of expenditure, approximately eighteen minutes before he lost consciousness. At which point one or both Servants would either terminate the contract or begin doing something else to solve their supply problem, and neither option was survivable without his input.
He had eighteen minutes to prevent his own death.
He was also, he realized, kneeling.
He wasn't sure when he'd gone back to kneeling. His legs had apparently made another executive decision. He reasserted control over them, by effort of will and also by placing both palms on the concrete and pushing, and arrived back at standing, which felt like a more appropriate posture for a conversation he was about to have.
The one on his left spoke first.
"I ask of you." Her voice was what he'd expected and also nothing like what he'd expected, which was a paradox he didn't have the bandwidth to resolve right now. It was formal and precise and had the specific quality of a voice that had been used to giving orders in places where orders needed to carry across noise and weather and the sound of people dying. It was also, underneath all of that, just a voice. Young. Tired in a way the posture didn't show. "Are you my Master?"
He opened his mouth.
The one on his right moved — not aggressively, just a shift, a chain tilting slightly as her weight redistributed. Her voice was quieter than the other's, with a texture to it like something smooth over something not smooth. She did not look at him the way the other one looked at him. She looked at him the way you look at a problem you're already three steps into solving.
"And which of us," she said, "did you intend to feed first?"
He was aware that both of them were waiting. He was aware that his mana reserves were continuing their downward trajectory regardless of whether he answered. He was aware that somewhere in Fuyuki, right now, there were six other Masters who had been conducting six other rituals, and that at least one of those rituals had just registered a seismic anomaly in the war's underlying architecture — a seventh Master, unregistered, carrying two Servants in a single fractured contract.
He had announced himself. Not quietly. Not subtly. He had fired a flare into the metaphysical sky of the Fifth Holy Grail War and the flare had been visible from orbit, and the war had not even officially started yet.
He also had seventeen minutes now.
"Yes," he said, to the one on his left. And then, to the one on his right: "I'm working on it."
He was aware, distantly, that this was not an adequate response. He was also aware that the presence he'd just noticed at the top of the basement stairs — the weight, the specific quality of attention pressing through the closed door between the stairwell and the ground floor like light under a door — was not something he had scheduled for tonight, and was not, from the metaphysical texture of it, something small.
He didn't look at the door. He kept his eyes on his Servants, because they were the immediate problem, and because he had a rule about looking at a door when something was behind it that he wasn't ready to deal with.
I knew the script by heart, he thought. Every branch. Every decision point. Every moment where the story could go one way or the other and I knew which way it went.
The presence behind the door leaned on the handle.
Someone just ripped out the pages.
[End of Chapter 1: The Fourteenth Syllable]