What does someone think about when they are buried beneath All the World's Evil?
Kiritsugu and Kayneth were undoubtedly the two unluckiest of the lot. They had both, out of caution, stationed themselves on the outer edge of the Holy Grail War.
The result was that when All the World's Evil burst forth, that Ruler immediately unleashed a Noble Phantasm broad enough to nearly cover all of Fuyuki—so that the people positioned closest to the Grail took no damage at all.
There was no escape. The black mud was actively repelled outward from the center of the light. The man farthest from it—Kiritsugu—took the full force of the wave head-on.
The moment he blacked out, his consciousness slipped into the interior of the Grail.
"Where am I?"
He glanced around. An ordinary room. In one corner sat a television.
Kiritsugu had a faint inkling. "If I were to win this Holy Grail War, how would the Grail grant my wish?"
The television clicked on by itself. "One ship carries three hundred people. Another carries two hundred. You can repair one of them. The other ship's people are loudly demanding you fix theirs first. What would you do?"
Kiritsugu frowned. He smelled blood on the question.
He opened the door to the room and realized he was in fact in the cabin of a ship. Out on the deck, blood was everywhere.
"Correct. This is Kiritsugu Emiya."
"Correct…"
What kind of joke was this?
Kiritsugu took a step back. Memory of his own past flooded in.
His father had been a magus marked with a Sealing Designation, and his mother had been killed by pursuers when he was very young.
In childhood, the girl he had loved like a sister had studied his father's research—a magecraft that could petrify flowers—and one day, out of curiosity, she had used it on herself to see what would happen. She'd become a Dead Apostle. The girl had begged him to understand her, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to act. The disaster spread to the entire town.
Naturally, the Mage's Association and the Holy Church intervened. They had come for Kiritsugu's father—the root cause—but in the end it was Kiritsugu himself who pulled the trigger, exacting justice on his own blood.
It was then that he met the second person he would ever truly love—his teacher, both mentor and mother to him.
She was the one who had truly shaped his life. She wasn't quite a magus belonging to any orthodox faction—she was, simply put, a bounty hunter who took whatever job paid. She was the reason he became the Magus Killer.
In her hands, Kiritsugu spent nearly his entire adolescence. The Origin Bullets had been crafted with her help. Until, on a mission to assassinate a Dead Apostle on a plane, the target had held back a final card and converted every human on board—save for the teacher—into Dead Apostles.
She holed up in the cockpit, staying in contact with him over the radio.
"After we get back safely from this one, I'll start looking after you the way a proper mother should. Though I'm not sure if I'll make it back this time." Kiritsugu still remembered those words.
"Yeah. You'll come back. You will," he had said—even as he assembled a rocket launcher and trained it on the descending passenger plane she was piloting.
What kind of catastrophe would a plane full of Dead Apostles bring if it landed safely?
Sacrifice the few to save the many. That had been his definition of justice. Because he never wanted things to be that way again, he wanted to win the Holy Grail War and wish for world peace.
He came out of the vision. The black mud on his body had been dispelled by the saint's manifestation. Kiritsugu lay slumped on the ground.
But the so-called Holy Grail—was that really what it was?
The light was so warm.
Briiing—briiing—
His phone was ringing. His mistr—his assistant.
Kiritsugu stared blankly for a long while. He didn't pick up until the ringing had gone on for nearly twenty seconds. "Maiya?"
"You have a call. From Ilya."
"Ilya?" Kiritsugu frowned.
He had, out of caution, prepared two phones. The one in his hand had only two contacts: Iri and Maiya. Setting aside the matter of the phone number, given the Einzbern family's stance, Illya—who was in a sense their leverage—shouldn't have been able to make a call out at all.
"She's crying very hard. Says many people in the Einzbern family are dead. Only a handful are still alive. The maid taking care of her, for example." Maiya's voice was flat, but threaded with helplessness.
You couldn't blame her for the vagueness of the report. Putting together a coherent picture from a sobbing little girl was no easy task. A child that age didn't necessarily produce complete sentences to begin with.
"I see." Kiritsugu looked up at the radiance fading from the sky.
Yes. He still had a wife and daughter, and his assistant. He wasn't left with nothing.
Was this a second chance at atonement granted to him by God? But if there was truly a God, why would the world be filled with so much sin?
———
"The Grail's yours."
Yimi reached out and patted Ritsuka on the waist.
"Do we still have to keep fighting?" Ritsuka looked down at the fully purified cup in her hands. "Doctor, has Spiritron Transfer come back online?"
The signal was gone. It looked like, at the very least, they weren't leaving anytime soon.
After Yimi had answered the doctor's earlier question, he had been stunned for a long while.
Anyone would have been.
There was a faint, dizzying tug—the cup seemed to want to take her somewhere—but Yimi's Materialization-of-the-Soul mana had gone strangely stable inside it, holding the Lesser Grail at saturation without triggering activation.
Seeing the object in her hands, Tokiomi's breathing turned heavy. Servants like Diarmuid, who held no real desire for the Grail, were the minority.
"Are we continuing or not?" Ritsuka casually tucked the Grail into her coat.
This was the Grail her Holy Grandchild had given her. That made it hers!
Tokiomi nearly succumbed to a flash impulse to abandon all dignity and grovel at the little girl's feet. The ideal his Three Founding Families had pursued for generations was right there in front of him, and he simply could not take it back.
How could it be…
He looked down at the single unused Command Spell on his hand.
"Heh. This king's only view of the Holy Grail was that as part of this king's collection, it ought not be sullied by a herd of mongrels. As an actor, that performance was abysmally bad. But as a gift, bestowing it upon you is not unthinkable. However—" Gilgamesh propped his cheek on one hand, his crimson eyes fixed on Ritsuka.
"—if you believe that a show of force is enough to make this king back down, then I have no choice but to call you a mongrel as well."
He was in a foul mood. Of course he was. The pivotal figure of the entire war hadn't even gotten to declare the true name of a single Noble Phantasm.
"I'd love to contest it, but the match is already lost." Beside him, the King of Conquerors began to shimmer with Spiritron particles. He looked over at Artoria. "Little lady. You have a fine retainer."
"My apologies. The opponent was also a king whose name will echo through history. Holding back proved more difficult than expected." That was Lancelot's report. "And in passing—I noticed Lancer has left the field as well."
Which meant that, excluding the Masters—who hadn't really been combatants to begin with—the only Servants left on the field were the three of them. Lancelot dropped to one knee before Artoria and offered up his blade.
"My King. The only wish I held for entering this Holy Grail War was a single one."