Chapter 1

Three command spells. A scream of utter despair. And a Noble Phantasm of holy light that lit up the heavens. The Lesser Grail was utterly annihilated, but left in its place was a gaping hole in the sky, akin to an eclipse. The grail mud escaped from the hole, leaving behind blackened ruins and searing flames. In the midst of this hell, a lone man stumbled around the desolate ruins, desperately searching for someone, anyone, in order to fulfill his broken ideals. The putrid mud continued to pour forth from the maelstrom of evil in the sky, the mud completely consuming the golden king and the empty priest. Even while smoke suffused the air, suffocating the man, and the heat seared his hands and clothes, he still persisted, lifting debris and yelling as hard as he could, to find even just a single survivor. Tears stung at his eyes, and his lungs started reaching their limits, but the sheath protected him with its now limited powers, granting him an extended time limit. And eventually, he found him. The young boy, staggering through the dying and the dead, red hair stained by soot and ashes, with everything burned away except for his body and life.

A slight distance away, the king and the priest conversed, both with the curse of the mud in their bodies. The priest, having received his wish from the grail, finally found the answer to the question he had held in his heart, understanding the true nature of his twisted self. His laughter reached the heavens, revelling in the absurd comedy of his own existence. Yet, he still craved to understand the why, even after knowing what he was, and so he made a new covenant, to understand the principle behind the man that would later on be known to Emiya Shirou as Kotomine Kirei. Just as he was about to leave, he caught sight of what was once his mortal enemy a short while ago, the man known as the Magus Killer, Emiya Kiritsugu. Seeing his enemy digging up the rubble, putting all his strength into looking for survivors made a scowl appear on the priests face. But in the end, he turned his back on him and left with the king, leaving the Magus Killer to his salvation.

The boy discarded all of his emotions during his trek through the hell that would be known to the rest of the world as the Great Fire of Fuyuki that took five hundred lives and 134 buildings in a single day. Having lost all hope and energy, he collapsed, preparing to close his eyes and surrender to the sweet call of fatigue that permeated throughout his entire body. As he was about to fall into an eternal sleep, he dredged up all of his remaining strength to stretch his right hand towards the sky, a final prayer for someone, anyone, to save him. In that moment, a warm hand reached out and grasped his hand firmly. With tears falling out of his eyes, the broken man finally found his salvation. A warm light passed between the two, the gift of life given to the boy in the form of a sheath, allowing him to become the one and only survivor of the Great Fire of Fuyuki, Emiya Shirou.

In the midst of all this chaos, a dark presence in the core of the Holy Grail observed everything that had happened.

"FUCKJUBSSAGGINGBALLSANDHISWRINKLYANUSPISSONTHEBLONDSTICK-IN-HER-ASSSWORDFREAKANDHERMIDDLEAGEDBROKEASSLOOKINGMASTERWITHTHATSHITTYUNSHAVEDSTUBBLE*! # #!$%#$%%&*(&*(%$:":?" #$" and so on.

The Extra Class servant Avenger killed in the Third Holy Grail War spat out a flowing stream of curses and swear words, with some choice insults due to the information recently assimilated from Irisviel von Einzbern the homunculus when she became the Lesser Grail. His frustration stemmed from the fact that the damn hypocritical spiky haired man had refused to make a wish and ordered his servant to destroy the Lesser Grail, preventing him from fully manifesting in Fuyuki after the end of the Fourth Holy Grail War.

After he was killed in the Third Holy Grail War, he was converted into energy and sent to the Greater Grail to serve as fuel for it's "wish-granting" function. However, the perversion of his class wrought by the homunculus magus family the Einzberns caused the Greater Grail to become polluted by his essence, the Zoroastrian god of evil Angra Mainyu. As a result, the Greater Grail became something like a "monkey's paw", still capable of granting wishes, but in the worst way possible. Angra Mainyu, or All the World's Evil, was also realized by the Greater Grail into the god of evil that he was supposed to be summoned as, but incapable of leaving the Greater Grail, instead slumbering within it "like a mother's warm placenta", waiting and searching for opportunities to fully manifest in the world.

The Fourth Holy Grail War had been his chance, as long as the victor wished for something, he could've manifested by hijacking the energy stored in the Greater Grail. After his attempt was blocked by that man though, he now had to wait for at least another decade for the Fifth Holy Grail War. The only good thing to happen to him was that the monotonous hibernation "he" experienced in the Grail was broken by the absorption of Irisviel's consciousness into the Grail after she became the Lesser Grail, granting a very small shard of him enough self-consciousness to hold a conversation with the last Master in the war Emiya Kiritsugu, in an attempt to convince the man to follow the path he had taken all his life to the very end. He had also met the flashy golden king, Gilgamesh, and having the king acknowledge him was something surprising. In the end, he decided to give Gilgamesh true incarnation and his master, Gilgamesh's mana battery, a second chance at life, since absorbing either of them wouldn't help him meaningfully in any way.

"Still, that damn bitch and her master…"

Thoughts of vengeance tugged at the little sense of self-consciousness he retained after Kiritsugu destroyed the Lesser Grail, stoking the flames of fury that naturally existed with the myriad evils of mankind. He would definitely make that man and his servant pay. But how? Kiritsugu was already cursed to feel regret as well as physical pain while the mud slowly poisoned him to death, and his servant Saber had already disappeared. There didn't seem to be much he could do to take revenge on them.

"Wait...didn't he save someone in the ruins?"

Avenger thought back to what happened after the Lesser Grail was destroyed. While he wasn't able to fully manifest, the black mud that poured out of the sky was technically still part of him, and he had felt it snuff out many lives. However, one had eluded him somehow, his poison in that person's body cleansed through some unknown means. He knew that the only people who could have possibly survived the fire were the priest, the king and Kiritsugu, and it didn't seem likely for the priest and the king to save anyone. Although since those two were so far from the common sense of man, it was hard to predict their actions. Still, for Kiritsugu, the man who once dreamed of being a Hero of Justice, to save someone was far more likely.

"In that case, I can just target him instead. That person who he saved, I'll hunt him down and tear out his heart. No, I'll sink him into the abyss of mankind's evils, and have him experience every curse that exists until he breaks from despair or insanity."

However, there was still a problem, since he was trapped in the Grail and couldn't really do anything. Then inspiration struck.

"What if I work through the Grail?"

Just his presence was already enough to make it viable for the Grail to summon anti-heroes, so if he purposefully tweaked the Grail and its underlying systems, he should be able to mess with the Master selection and summoning of Servants. In fact, it was possible he'd be able to summon the same blond swordswoman who destroyed his chance by those maguses who summoned without a catalyst. After all, surely there would be people who were compatible with some version of her recorded in the Throne of Heroes, since it existed outside of the time axis, allowing to cover all time lines possible. As for selecting Masters, the person who Kiritsugu saved already had a karmic connection to the Holy Grail by being the only one to survive the disaster called the Great Fire of Fuyuki caused by the Fourth Holy Grail War. Hopefully, that would be enough for him to be chosen.

"I also have massive amounts of energy stockpiled in the Greater Grail, since there haven't been any outlets for the energy accumulated through the sacrifice of Servants in the past Holy Grail Wars. Might as well use it to get started on some fail-safes, in case something goes wrong."

With that, the self-conscious sliver of All the World's Evils started laying the groundwork for the event that would later become known to the Moonlit World as the Fifth Holy Grail War.