Fate: Paradox Reincarnator - Reboot

by WhatIsAQM

Shinji Matou suddenly wakes up with a new set of memories in his head, the memories of somebody who had already read the story that he was a player in, with those memories, he'd do all he could to avert his dead ends. Rebooted version of the original Fate/Paradox Reincarnator which was originally posted off-site.

My eyes opened slowly, the brightness of the room was... unexpected, to say the least, and I was temporarily blinded by the rays of the sun beaming down upon me through the window. Did I open the curtain or something? I certainly didn't remember doing something like that when I went to sleep last night. What's more... these sheets... felt quite a bit softer than what I was used to sleeping in. I clambered off of the bed and ended up nearly falling flat on my face when I did. The moment I had left the embrace of the sheets, it seemed as if my body had decided to fail me, as I misjudged the distance that the side of the bed was from the ground somehow, and my thin short arms were only just capable of stopping me from really hurting myself and... wait a second...

I certainly didn't consider myself to be out of shape or overweight or anything, but... these arms... I was so thin! My hands were so... small! This place... it could be a hospital bedroom... maybe some sort of specialist hospital for the terminally sick? No, wait that couldn't be right. I wasn't hooked up to any health-monitoring equipment, and I felt fine for that matter as well. As quick as I was to assume that I had slipped into some sort of coma and had only just woken up... it couldn't be the case. Not unless I'd woken up in the worst equipped hospital this side of America.

I picked myself up from the floor, my clothes were obviously different, but the plain white pajamas I was wearing didn't exactly look like the sort of clothes that you'd find a hospital patient wearing either. They looked... far too expensive. What was going on here? What was my name...? I... It was Shinji, right? But... that didn't make sense, that's not my name, is it? What's... what's happening to me?

I tried to remember who I was, but all my memories were a blur, I couldn't remember everything... just fragments. My name... my name... it wasn't Shinji, that wasn't my name was it? But I couldn't remember what my name actually was. My mind screamed in agony as I remembered things that did not happen to me, and things that did happen to me. No... these things did happen, but... they happened to both of me? Both of me...? Right, my name is Shinji and ██████. ...? ██████? Why... why can't I pronounce my name? No... why can't I remember it? People don't have two names usually, do they?

The mind of a seven year old boy raced with the questions of somebody in his late twenties, somebody who couldn't remember most of his life except the basics. "What's... happening to me?!" I screamed in a voice that both was and was not my own as I raced towards the closest mirror atop a dressing table. I needed to stand on a chair in order to properly see myself, and in that moment my heart stopped.

Standing there on top of the chair... the reflection looking back at me was Shinji... Shinji Matou. Finally, my two sets of memories fell into place, and we... no I understood what had happened. Somehow, I had been reincarnated... I... no, my soul had been reincarnated as Shinji Matou, that easy-to-hate tertiary villain from Fate/Stay Night.

"You've... you've got to be kidding me." I looked at my own reflection dumbly blinking at myself. Not knowing just what had happened, nor what I was supposed to do. Immediately, I started to think, I might now and still be a seven year old boy, but that didn't mean that I'd become stupid... not that I was stupid before... my memories were now directly conflicting with one another, despite the fact that I was a singular being. Even if there was a conflict in my memories, I could feel that somehow, we had become one and the same, our two souls had fused into a singular one, and we were a brand new being... well, I kept saying 'we' but there in truth wasn't a 'we', not anymore.

I started to sift through the memories of Shinji, the memories of the one who had always lived in this world. Though at first I had assumed that I would be in Japan due to it being Shinji's country of birth, I really couldn't have been further from the truth, at least in terms of distance. But what was I doing in England...? I started to think, to try to remember why I was here, and I quickly came to the answer.

It was the year 1994… and the day was… February… the 7th? The Fourth Holy Grail War! Shinji wasn't told, but that was why I had been sent away from home! I had been sent to study abroad in England so that I'd be far away from the Holy Grail War and wouldn't get caught up in it or used as a hostage or something! It was actually quite remarkable that either Zouken or Byakuya had an idea like that when Tokiomi completely ignored the possibility that Rin might end up in danger as a result of the war… but then again, Tokiomi was a complete jackass. The operative term there being was, considering that if the Fourth War was now over, that meant that Kirei Kotomine has already murdered him, and with Aoi left in a permanently catatonic state, Rin would soon find herself without any parents at all…

But Rin's troubles were the least of my concerns right now. What mattered to me was the fact that I knew all of this, and I needed to keep it secret from… well just about everybody. The knowledge of the future that I had thanks to having read the story before was dangerous, there was no telling what a magus or even something like a Dead Apostle might do if they were to find out about me. There was also the fact that when I returned home… when I returned to Fuyuki, I'd be under the watchful eye of Zouken. That son of a bitch would prove to be my greatest obstacle in this life. What he was doing to Sakura was absolutely inexcusable and unforgivable. If he caught on to the truth of what I actually was, then I could almost certainly expect treatment even worse than what Sakura is being forced to go through by him… which is why I needed to keep him unaware of what I was. Killing him without killing Sakura was going to be difficult, but… if I could somehow find a user of the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, then killing him off would be as simple as having them stab him in a Death Point! But I was getting ahead of myself, I didn't even know if Shiki existed… either Shiki Tohno or Shiki Ryougi, there was just as much a chance that neither of them existed at all! That meant that if I couldn't find them, I'd have to pin my hopes on the Holy Grail War, and try to get a catalyst of a Servant with the means to kill somebody like Zouken without harming Sakura...

Sakura… Sakura was my sister now. Shinji had never actually met her before this point, as her adoption into the Matou had been incredibly recent. I started to think about Sakura… her emotional strength and willpower is truly admirable, but she couldn't be forced to go through that suffering at the hands of that cold hearted worm bastard. I needed to save her. I needed to save Sakura and I needed to kill Zouken. Those two things absolutely needed to happen if I was going to live in this world as Shinji Matou… or I could take the coward's route out, and try to run away and make it alone in the world as a… what, a seven year old boy?

Well… I might not be alone, not… entirely. I can't remember who actually hired her, but downstairs was a freelance spellcaster, somebody that a rich enough family could hire to take on any sort of job that needed to be done. Shinji hadn't figured it out by himself, but looking back on those memories that were formed by Shinji, I could easily figure out that the woman who had been hanging around Shinji over the past few weeks wasn't just some tutor or babysitter. For one, she hadn't tutored Shinji once during the time he had been at this place, and the second dead giveaway was in her eyes. Her eyes were cold, far too cold to belong to a random babysitter, her eyes could only belong to a killer. I was actually terrified of going downstairs because of those memories, the woman and Shinji… they hadn't interacted much at all, a lot of that had to do with the fact that the woman spoke abysmal Japanese and Shinji's grasp of the English Language, while fantastic for a seven year old Japanese boy… it wasn't good enough to converse with her… or at least it hadn't been before I came about. I had made an effort to learn two languages in the life I lived before finding myself here, German and Japanese… in addition to my native English, of course. I didn't even need the native knowledge of how to speak Japanese that Shinji had before we became a single entity.

But even if I could speak with the woman, that… didn't mean that it was a good idea. Shinji had vague recollections of her name being something like 'Monica', but that woman… she was deadly, without a doubt. It was actually something of a surprise that the Matou would spend so much effort in ensuring that Shinji was safe, considering how little value that Zouken must've actually thought Shinji had to the family, but at the same time, if a family couldn't keep their heir safe during a ritual that they set up themselves, their reputation would suffer a great deal. Even if I wasn't the heir of the Matou thanks to Zouken's scheme with Sakura and my unfortunate lack of Magic Circuits, news like that takes time to travel around, and even for a family that didn't really care about their reputation like the Matou under Zouken's leadership, it was still important to not appear weak. A family that appeared weak in the World of Magecraft was one that would soon find themselves being targeted by opportunistic magi eager to steal their secrets. Doubly so for a family like the Matou, who had been in part responsible for a grand ritual like the Holy Grail War.

I paced around the room nervously as I thought about what I should do. "Wait!" I suddenly stopped in place. "This is like one of those Isekai stories, right? Then that means I should have a cheat skill, right?" I spoke aloud as I tried to delude myself into thinking that I might've been blessed with some broken cheat skill that would make life effortless for me. "OK! Uh… observe?" Nothing happened. "Status!" Nothing happened. "Magic Missile?" Nothing happened. I didn't have a cheat skill… or at least if I did, it wasn't one that I could detect so easily. Wishful thinking about having some sort of wondrous cheat ability aside, I still needed to figure out just what I was going to do about the woman who was downstairs. I supposed that I'd need to keep playing the part of the seven year old Shinji… thankfully, before we became a new being through whatever caused us to fuse together, Shinji was still just a normal seven year old boy… for the most part. He had been deeply scarred by the knowledge of his mother being thrown down a pit full of Crest Worms for her failure in producing an heir with Magic Circuits… but it wasn't to the degree that it had affected his psyche from a young age. He had spent a great amount of time perusing the many grimoires and journals of the Matou mansion, despite having been already informed that it was probably pointless to try to learn magic by his father already. There was of course a form of magecraft that even Shinji… or that is to say that I could use in Formalcraft, a system of magecraft that used the Mana of the surroundings and complicated rituals and magic circles to create magical effects without needing to use Magic Circuits at all! But unfortunately for me, that form of magecraft was almost completely ignored by the majority of the World of Magecraft, it was inefficient, it was time-consuming, and it was underdeveloped. It would take a Formalcraft User hours of setting up the ritual circles to create a magical flame or light that would take a typical Magus with Magic Circuits a few seconds.

Oddly enough, I found that I could remember absolutely everything that Shinji had read about in the grimoires… every single page and word was vivid in my memory, the contents of dozens of books that Shinji could barely understand are still fresh in his mind… wait… wasn't this what they called an 'eidetic memory'? The ability to recall images and information perfectly after only a few moments of looking at it? I had heard that it was more prevalent in children and that it was lost when a certain age was reached, but… it looked like Shinji had it, and the resulting 'Shinji' that the fusion of the two souls ended up creating had retained it. This was wonderful news, the moment I got access to the Matou family library, there wasn't a single one of the books I wouldn't read… or at least glance through all of the pages to pick through the information at my leisure at a later date. Who knows, maybe I'd find something in all of those books that would allow me to deal with Zouken… perhaps if I devised a poison that only targeted Crest Worms? I'd need to remember to look into something like that, a poison non-lethal to humans but toxic to Crest Worms… if I couldn't find a user of the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, then that would likely be my best bet at killing Zouken… or if not killing Zouken, at least freeing Sakura from his clutches and going on the run with her.

It was just an idea right now, but even if I found myself incapable of creating a toxin that only dealt with Zouken's Crest Worms, I could still try my luck at summoning a Servant like Semiramis or another Assassin that specialized in poisons in the Holy Grail War, the war wasn't exactly important to me… or maybe it was. I obviously knew that a wish was impossible because of the corruption of the Grail thanks to the Einzbern's characteristically short-sighted attempt to cheat their own ritual by summoning a god of evil which only ended up in causing the grail to become corrupted by Angra Mainyu. It was also because of that same corruption that the Holy Grail, which under normal circumstances would only be able to summon heroic figures from the Throne of Heroes, became able to call out to those who humanity saw as evil or villainous figures. People like Gilles de Rais, Medea of Colchis or Medusa, though out of those three, only one was actually truly evil, it should've still been impossible for any of them to have been summoned in the first place. When I really thought about it like that, it was actually kind of funny that nobody figured out that something might've been wrong with the Grail after it summoned Gilles de Rais, who proceeded to try to eliminate the entire city. Though it's not like there was anybody who could really investigate it. The Mage's Association would almost certainly be violating terms and conditions that they agreed to with the Three Founding Families over two hundred years ago if they attempted to investigate the status of the Grail, the Einzbern simply didn't care, nor did Zouken… and that just left Rin as the one remaining member of the Founding Families that had the authority to look into the current status of the grail… and she was seven.

I heard a knocking at the door, and my vision immediately snapped towards the noise's direction. "Are you… OK… Matou-kun?" It was Monica, apparently drawn to the noise I made when I clumsily fell out of bed. "I can perform…" The woman took a long pause as she seemed to struggle with finding the right word before deciding on just what she wanted to say. "...First Aid if you need it?" This was it, the moment of truth. I'd need to play things off as a child would, so as not to arouse suspicion from the woman, which might be a little more difficult than it first seemed. If the woman really was a Freelance Spellcaster as I had assumed, then I could only expect her intuition to be as sharp as a razor.

"T-that's fine, Monica-san… I don't need it." I quickly answered her, refusing the offer of First Aid, I was actually fine, I hadn't hurt myself at all.

"Well, if you're sure." The voice wasn't nearly as cold as I was expecting, even if her eyes were cold, it seemed like she was at least the sort of person to have a soft-spot for children… that might've been why she agreed to take this job, when you thought about it. I couldn't imagine that the pay for watching over a child for a week or two was especially high, even if the Matou did still have quite the sizable fortune that Zouken had naturally acquired over his many years of being alive. It did help that unlike the Tohsaka, the Matou weren't throwing money down the drain for their magecraft… though what they did do… was far, far worse.

"Thank you for worrying." I bid the woman farewell in English, which caused the noise of her footsteps to stop.

"Don't worry about it. Just… doing what I've been paid to do." She spoke in English in her response to me, before she walked away faster than before. It didn't seem like she was a bad person at least, so I felt like I might be able to trust her. I should probably still have a couple of days in this house with the woman, and it would probably be a good idea to start a good relationship with her… for all I knew, she was going to be my only in to the World of Magecraft that wasn't related to Zouken, so… over the next few days I had before I was inevitably sent back home to Japan to my family and to meet Sakura for the first time, I needed to prioritize on trying to get this woman to like me somehow… she'd already shown that she had something of a soft-spot for children… or at least I thought that she did, I could've been misreading her completely though.

I sighed as I fell back down onto my bed. Shinji… didn't have Magic Circuits, so my options were fairly limited as to what I could actually do here… well that wasn't quite true. The original Shinji did have Magic Circuits, but I didn't have any means of forcing them open, not after the generations of degradation that the Matou bloodline had gone through. To do that, I'd need something like the core of the Lesser Grail flowing an incredible amount of Magical Energy through my body, and… there were a few problems with that idea, the first was that to get my hands on something like that, I'd need to actually kill Illyasviel von Einzbern, which was completely out of the question, the second thing I'd need to cope with is having my body explode into tumorous growths, which was similarly out of the question, and the third and final thing is that even if I did unlock those Magic Circuits, they'd still be inferior to even somebody like Shirou's circuits, so it would be an incredible amount of effort just to end up with the potential of a fourth rate magus.

Sighing one final time, I got up from the bed and started to get dressed. I didn't really know what my first steps were going to be, but I supposed that the most crucial thing to do right now was try to get the woman who had been given the task of protecting me to actually like me. I was really betting on the fact that she seemed to have a soft-spot for kids… even if I myself had never seen her face. Of course, I had memories of seeing her face, but… those memories despite being me… they weren't me. It was odd to think of myself as being something new from what I once was… but it was also the only way I could think after what had happened.

Putting on a white dress shirt, a pair of navy blue dress pants and a waistcoat that matched the color of the pants before finding a pair of shoes, I finally left the bedroom, and I truly took my first steps in this new life that I would be living. Could we ever be separated? Could I return to the life that I had been taken from? I couldn't even tell what sort of a life that it had been with my hazy memories of those times. In fact, the only things that were clear from those memories were either things that I thought of as fictional, or just information on subjects like science and mathematics… the absolute most that I could remember from those memories was information about events that I was completely uninvolved in, but I couldn't remember anything about who I was before this, or if I had a family, or even what could've sent me here. Hell, there was even a chance that there was another me, still sleeping peacefully in his own bed and that the memories of that me were just taken and used to create another 'me'. My head hurt from the possibilities, and it just wasn't worth thinking about how I could have come here. I probably wouldn't ever receive an explanation from anybody who could possibly know… hell, the only two people that came to mind who could possibly have information were Zelretch himself, or Shiki Ryougi using her connection to the Root. I didn't really want to come across either of them. Shiki was fine, that much was true… but there was really no telling how Void Shiki might react to me, and she certainly wouldn't be happy if I bothered the normal Shiki into a meeting with her. That just left Zelretch, and… well, the less I interact with Zelretch, the better, I had enough on my plate as it was, so I didn't exactly need to complicate things even further by mixing Parallel Worlds into things.

Leaving my room and wandering down the carpeted corridor of the house, I tried to recall where exactly I was. It wasn't a hotel, but it was instead an old Matou property that had been kept in London as a place for them to stay at whenever they had business with the Clocktower… of course, it wasn't often that the Matou had any such business, but not even Zouken was about to completely ignore the possibility that he might be called to the Clocktower over something, so this place probably existed more as a contingency for stuff like that than anything else… or at least that's what I thought anyway. I could be wrong, but it's not likely that this house was bought just for the sake of the Holy Grail War… unfortunately though, the nature of the house as a temporary abode for the Matou to use when on official business meant that it was unlikely that any books related to magecraft would be here. Though I could always just sift through the memories I have of the time Shinji tried to read Grimoires that were way past his level instead, but that wasn't exactly the most important thing to do right now.

"Good morning, Monica." I spoke to the woman who was lounging on one of the house's sofas and idly scrolling through the limited number of TV channels available in the UK. Her short brown hair reached to her neck, and her brown eyes showed an incredible boredom… she was probably about twenty three or twenty four years old. She also was clearly getting frustrated by the fact that there were only… well it looked like there were only four channels that she was just cycling through over and over again. It was kind of strange that she was even using a television in the first place, especially if she was a magecraft user. Could I have been mistaken in my initial assumption that she was hired as some form of bodyguard…? No, if she was just meant to keep an eye on me, she would have been far more qualified to take on that role. But I couldn't exactly start asking her about her magecraft either way, it would either be impolite, or it would be a breach of the masquerade that the Mage's Association tries to uphold to keep the general populace unaware of their activities. Though most of the time, their attempts were just brute-forcing by hypnotizing people to forget things and by relying on the population being both blind and stupid. Oh right, and just murdering the people who end up being too much of a liability when it comes to how visible their activities are. In the end though, as they don't seem to have ever tried to make any sort of an effort to control the internet and the mass exchange of information that will eventually come to pass in about a decade and a half from this point, their world will eventually fall apart. Oh well, that's not my problem.

"Oh, good morning, Shinji… have you been working on your English?" She raised an eyebrow as I spoke to her in better English than what she had been expecting from Shinji based on the prior interactions that the two of us had shared. Though I made an effort not to appear that much more fluent in the language than I had been before. Possession wasn't exactly something that was common, even in the World of Magecraft, though if Monica actually was some sort of Magecraft user, then she'd at least have some idea on it… so I needed to be careful that she didn't get suspicious of me… even if I don't think what had happened to me could really be called a form of possession in the first place. I wasn't the same person as the one who had those memories from a different world, nor was I the original Shinji Matou anymore… I was something else.

"A little." I shrugged, trying to play off my newly exhibited skill in speaking English as something natural. "I'm a quick study." Technically, it wasn't a lie at all, even before becoming what I am now, I don't think that either of my component parts were even close to being stupid. Shinji would've grown into a vain and arrogant individual who acted rashly and out of jealously due to an inferiority complex formed around his inability to use magecraft, but… at the same time, he was the sort of person who could excel at anything that he had set his mind to, that was one of the reasons his failure to perform magecraft had caused him to be consumed by his hateful jealousy in the first place. His failure to do a single thing only ever served to exacerbate his feelings of inferiority. Odd that I was thinking about what could've become of my future self in such a way, but it was unavoidable with the memories that I now had.

"Mhm." Monica didn't seem all that concerned by my newfound ability to speak more fluent English, at least she wasn't the hyper-paranoid sort of person who picked up on any minute change and relentlessly pursued it, which would've been a real pain in the ass to deal with… maybe I should stop being so paranoid too? Unless I started acting incredibly unusual towards people, it wasn't like I would arouse that much suspicion anyway. It's not like there were any people who could possibly notice the differences in how I was going to be acting in the future. Byakuya was a broken shell of a man who tried to run from his problems with the power of alcohol. Zouken, while observant enough that he'd notice the differences in how I was acting, made it pretty clear he didn't really care about me in the past. That just left any friends that I had at school back home in Japan who obviously won't be able to see the difference on account of them being children. "Say… do you know how this TV works?"

"The… TV?" I hesitated for a moment. "What's wrong with it… weren't you the one who bought it?" I sifted through my memories quickly to confirm that she had in fact purchased the television and installed it, which led me to believe that she wasn't a Magus at all and really was a Spellcaster.

"Well… look at the remote." She showed me the TV remote, it looked fairly standard, having 10 numerical input buttons as well as the control for the TV's volume and channel switching buttons. "It look normal to you?"

"I… think so?" I couldn't see anything wrong with the remote, but Monica shook her head.

"Well, that's where you're wrong! What sort of TV has a remote with this many damn buttons but only four channels?!" She suddenly got angry at the TV and raised her voice. "Damn, this is why I usually take jobs in America…" She finished her sentence by grumbling something in German, which seemed to be her native language… though her spoken English was superb to the point I couldn't even pick-up anything other than a very light German accent, and that was only because she had just spoken German as a reflex.

"I… think you might need to get… I think it's called… Satellite TV?" It was quite startling that there were so few TV channels in England in the first place. How on earth did people ever get by with so little ways to entertain themselves? Hell, I couldn't even use the internet or a computer right now, considering that the internet was still incredibly primitive compared to what I remember, and computers were prohibitively expensive. Hell, the World Wide Web didn't even exist and wouldn't exist to the public until the middle of August next year!

"Oh… is that what it's called?" Monica paused for a moment. "...How?" It seemed that despite her not being outright hostile to the existence of technology like a lot of magi were, she still wasn't exactly the most competent in the operation of it. Honestly, that was kind of to be expected anyway, even if she was alright with using it, expecting her to know the specifics of technology in 1990 was a little much.

"You… have to get a company to install it, I… think?" In the age of digital streaming, it was a much simpler affair, all you had to do was sign up and pay for the service and it was all basically done immediately. It would take at least a few days to organize getting satellite TV installed though.

"Damn, that's gonna take way too long." She sighed, frustrated and bored at current events, I couldn't really blame her for feeling that way either. Though it was odd she didn't have anything better to do than try to find something on TV to watch.

"If you're bored… we could always go out and… I don't know, watch a movie?" I didn't really remember what might've been released around about this time, and I wasn't sure if it was because my memories from this time were non-existent, or if I simply hadn't been old enough at this time in my past life to know what was screening in the movie theaters.

"Really? Well… I was told to uhm… watch over you." She paused. "But I suppose it couldn't hurt if we were to go out some place together, hmm?" Well, that settles it, she really had been hired to protect me from whatever spillover the war might end up happening, which meant that unless she was just cheap to hire, she must've been powerful enough that Zouken was confident in her ability to fight off the likes of Kiritsugu Emiya, the Magus Killer. Of course, I knew the truth, and that Kiritsugu's career of the Magus Killer had been permanently put on hold as a result of the conclusion of the war. I also knew that within five years, the man would be dead, killed thanks to the curses in the grail mud.

"Right… so… the movies?" I gave Monica the most charming smile that I could manage, and she smiled back at me. "I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go whenever." I didn't exactly have much preparation in order to get ready, what with being seven years old and all.

"Preparation is overrated anyway." Monica replied with an annoyed sigh. "You wouldn't get it, but sometimes you just want to take care of something, and not have to wait for four days while you wait for somebody to-" She stopped herself and looked at me. "Sorry, wrong sort of person to be telling that to." I just tilted my head and gave her a confused smile. Oh yeah, this woman was absolutely a killer. Either that or an incredibly dedicated member of the paparazzi. "You ready now?"

"Uhm… yeah, I guess." I quickly responded to Monica's question.

"Great, then let's go! I… well, I can drive, but I sort of… don't have a car. You're OK with public transport, right?" Monica asked me a simple question, for some kids, public transport might be a little bit intimidating or overwhelming, but such problems hardly even came into question for somebody like me.

"Sure." I gave her a thumbs up, and she smiled at me as she got up and grabbed a coat that she'd hung up on a nearby hook. She also tossed me my own coat, it was February, so wearing a coat outside was pretty much a requirement, especially in a country like England, which… wasn't exactly famous for having warm winters.

I followed Monica out of the front door of the townhouse, leading on to the streets of London itself. It was time for me to truly begin this new life of mine.