The skies of Terra are burning.
Thousands of false stars shimmer and die in catastrophic explosions as fleets of immense size collide. Weapons powerful enough to turn cities into their component particles are unleashed, and the mighty defenses of the Lord of Iron buckle against their potency.
As above, so below. Transhuman warriors battle, their armored feet threading upon the corpses of defenders and attackers alike. Newly reborn forests burn and young seas evaporate. The air is thick with screams, and the Aether blazes with power. Far in the distance, he can taste the blood of mortals being spilled by the Ninth Legion – so much blood, the stain of it will never leave the Throneworld.
There he stands, amidst this frozen tableau of apocalyptic destruction.
He is strong, stronger than ever before. He learned much in the Maelstrom, and in the final battle of Caliban. Around him are his brothers, and the mortal witches whose souls burn to fuel his works. Great sorceries are performed at his command, crashing against the wards raised by the sons of the Cyclops.
He is mighty. He is doing what must be done. He knows this, just as he knows that there was no other path – that all the deaths of this day, all the deaths that led to it, and all those yet to come, are necessary. The False Emperor, who even now hides behind the Cavea Ferrum, must die.
He knows it. He believes it. He is the son of Lion El'Jonson, and he walked with his Primarch through the Crystal Labyrinth. He has seen the nightmarish future that must be averted, no matter the cost. And so he does all these terrible, evil things, and accepts that there is no choice.
The boy does not.
He stands before the warrior, here on this ancient battlefield dredged from the monster's past. There is a sword before him, stabbed into the ground. It is the mirror of the one at the Dark Angel's hip, yet is unblemished by the corruption that suffuses warrior and weapon alike.
"You are not me," Shirou Emiya says to the memory of the Chaos Sorcerer. "And I will never be you."
He pulls the sword free, its blade catching the light from the burning heavens, and points it at the towering figure of the Dark Angel.
The Dark Angel cocks his head to the side – the only motion in the entire dream that surrounds boy and warrior. His helmet does not let any emotion through, nor does any word leaves his vox-grill.
In that moment, Shirou catches a glimpse of something, something vast and terrible, lurking just beneath the surface of the warrior's appearance. Something that isn't at this frozen moment of time, but will be, in the grim darkness that will follow this devastation. Something powerful, strong enough that its presence reaches past the moment of its inception.
Even that glimpse is enough to fill Shirou with hate.
Mist erupts all around them, and the sight of the Siege of Terra vanishes. For a time, the boy sees nothing past the fog, hears nothing beyond his own, singular heartbeat.
Then there is a scream of shock and pain, piercing through the mist. He knows this voice.
Shirou Emiya opens his eyes.

July 23rd, 2003 AD – Emiya residence

The first lesson every Enforcer learned on the job was never to underestimate their prey.

Most of the time, when the Enforcers were dispatched on missions by the Clocktower, it was to hunt down Sealing Designates or Dead Apostles. On occasion, the former might not be all that dangerous – those would be the magi who had been slapped with Sealing Designation because they possessed some trait that made them more interesting as research specimens than researchers, and had no influential patron to keep them from being dissected alive. But there were the others – those who had pursued forbidden avenues of research, often transforming themselves in foolish bids to access the Root through ill-considered paths. Underestimating them because they had been stupid enough to pursue those avenues in the first place, or because of how ridiculous some of them sometimes sounded or looked, was a quick way to get oneself killed.

The same was true with Dead Apostles. Many of them loved to toy with their prey by projecting a façade of innocence. The Enforcers still weren't sure if the trend of vampire fiction portraying the inhuman bloodsuckers as tragic, romantic figures was a ploy of a particularly clever bloodsucker to make preying upon Humanity easier. In any case, they at least knew the truth : that no matter how young or harmless a Dead Apostle may look, they were still a monstrous predator to take down with extreme prejudice.

To be a Magus was to walk with death; and for the Enforcers, that death could take any aspect. Holding back from their full strength in any way, shape or form, was a one-way ticket to dying, often in a most horrible and upsetting manner.

As the door of the shed exploded, Bazett Fraga McRemitz realized that she had forgotten that lesson. She had focused on the girls in front of her, and forgotten about the threat posed by her actual target.

The heir of the Magus Killer was a terrifying sight, she wasn't ashamed to admit. His golden eyes blazed with power, his skin was covered in black lines akin to those that had been on the Matou girl's. Oh, and there was the little matter of the pair of wings that stretched behind him, looking as if they were woven of the shadows themselves.

He strode out of the shed like a wrathful dark god, leaving the grass charred black under his bare feet. His gaze turned to his right, where Rin Tohsaka was kneeling by her sister, looking at him in shock.

"E-Emiya-kun ?"

Emiya extended his arm, and a beautifully engraved gold and blue sheath appeared in his hand, shining in the afternoon sun. The object looked utterly out of place compared to Emiya's own demonic appearance. He tossed it to Tohsaka, who caught it clumsily.

"Put that against Sakura and hold it there," he told her, before returning his full attention to Bazett. His voice was deep, and seemed to echo even though they were outside.

Bazett felt the weight of his gaze as if it were a physical pressure. It was as if he were looking right through her, dissecting everything she was with his eyes. Those were probably Mystic Eyes, but she wasn't sensing any attack on her, so they were probably for perception rather than inflicting effects upon the World.

"Bazett Fraga McRemitz," he said slowly, pronouncing her name perfectly. "I see you."

That, thought Bazett, sounded a lot more ominous than it should have.

She had thought the contract to take him out sounded fishy the moment the Archibalds' agent had approached her. She had accepted it regardless, because she had become painfully aware that she needed a patron among the noble families if she was to ever rise in the Clocktower, even if she was one of the best Enforcers of her generation. She had thought it likely that the Archibalds had grossly exaggerated the threat posed by Emiya in order to justify their own grudge against his father.

Now ? Now, if anything, she felt the Archibalds had underestimated how dangerous the boy was. All records she had read before coming to Fuyuki had told that the Magus Killer, while a terrifyingly effective and amoral mercenary, had been a baseline human, with only a few tricks related to Magecraft. His reputation had been built on the heretical use of mundane weaponry and technology, along with a complete and utter disregard for the traditions and taboos of the Clocktower. But this ?

There is no way he is completely human. Did Kiritsugu Emiya find him like this, or did he experiment on him to make him more able to fulfill his purpose ?

"The son of the Magus Killer knows me," she replied out loud, keeping any nervousness from her voice. That was the second lesson Enforcers learned : never let them see you sweat. It was also, coincidentally, the first lesson noble brats were told by their families before being sent off to the Clocktower. "I don't know if I should be flattered or scared."

"These eyes of mine see much." Yep, definitely increased perception of some sort. "Judging by the runes woven in your clothes … you are an Enforcer, yes ? My father warned me about your kind."

"Did he now," she whispered under her breath, before speaking louder : "I am indeed an Enforcer of the Magus Association. If you stop … whatever it is you are doing … and surrender, I will bring you to the Clocktower, where you will be asked a few questions relating your murder of the Matou Head and capture of his Heir."

"Is that what you were told ? Even if that were true, I am not a member of the Magus Association. Only Tohsaka has any authority over me, and that's just because I live in her territory. Unless she called you here, which I know she did not, then you have no jurisdiction over me, Enforcer."

"You can't possibly think that will work," said Bazett incredulously. "Even if you aren't affiliated with the Association, you killed someone who was. There are consequences to that sort of thing. Or did the Magus Killer teach you nothing about the rules of the Moonlit World ?"

"The affairs of Magi are of no interest to me, so long as they do not interfere with those I care about. But my father made sure I had some knowledge of your rules, and what I know does not paint your presence here favourably." Despite its strangeness, his voice was still calm – but it was the calm of a silent sea in the hours before the coming of a city-wracking tempest. "You have invaded the territory of this city's Second Owner without her permission. You have then compounded that insult by actually assaulting her. You have broken into my property, injured my apprentice and sought to enter my Workshop. Whatever brought you here is no official Clocktower business."

She blinked. Workshop ? That shed ? Was he serious ? Wait, the Magus Killer was a renowned heretic. Maybe he was.

"Except that I am facing off against what looks like a fucking demon in the body of the Magus Killer's heir. Somehow I get the feeling that the big wigs will forgive me if I take out a threat like that."

"I am no threat to the Lords of the Clocktower, nor to anyone else in the Association, so long as they do not attack me first."

"Yes, well, you would say that, wouldn't you ? Except that you already have the blood of one family on your hands, and are using another to investigate a third. As I see it, you are a threat to the Clocktower."

"Is this what you were told ? You were lied to. I destroyed Zouken Matou because he was a monster, and the only reason I asked Tohsaka to look into the Einzbern was because of the worm's last words."

"Killing the Head of an old family because they are a 'monster' isn't a valid reason for the Clocktower. I am going to be honest and admit that your family name isn't helping your case either."

"The Archibalds sent her here, Emiya-kun," called out Tohsaka. She was still kneeling next to her sister, whose breathing had become easier since the sheath had been pressed against her body. That was some impressive healing there, Bazett noted.

"The Archibalds ? … Ah. That would explain it. So you do realize, McRemitz, that you are being used as a pawn in someone else's petty revenge against my dead father ?"

"Regardless of the Archibalds' initial motives for investigating you, your actions remain the same, and what I am seeing right now is making their interpretation of events, however self-serving, a hell of a lot more likely. One last time : surrender."

"One last time," parroted the Sixth Head of the House of Emiya : "Leave."

"I cannot do that," she replied. "I have my orders-"

Her words died on her tongue as she immediately realized that had been the wrong thing to say. His eyes flared, his wings twitched, and his expression, which had so far been unnervingly calm, twisted into a mask of wrath.

"You have 'orders' ? Orders justify nothing," he spat with seething contempt. "Your choices are your own, Enforcer. As are their consequences."

She breathed out. There wouldn't be any talking out of this, not that she had ever truly thought there would be.

"I suppose they are," she said, before taking a deep breath in.

Then she moved. All of her instincts were yelling at her to take him down quickly. The Matou girl had said that her weird transformation had been brought about by "Senpai's power", and if Emiya was the source then his attacks would be even more deadly.

Once again, she propelled herself forward at full speed, but this time, when she punched, she held nothing back. The air cracked at the speed of her fist, and it slammed into Emiya's chest with enough strength to turn the shirt he had been wearing into scraps of fabric.

Unfortunately, that was almost all the effect it had. Emiya grunted in pain, but he did not collapse, nor was he sent flying backward. The grass at his feet was scorched, but the earth wasn't gouged down as it would have been if he had managed to remain standing through strength alone. How …

His wings, she realized. They absorbed my punch's kinetic energy somehow.

She had no evidence, but instinctively she was certain of it. These … things that rose from her target's back were the reason he had been able to absorb her punch. It wasn't that his body was impervious to damage – if it had been hard enough to withstand her full-powered punch, her own fist would have been turned into a mess of broken bones and bleeding meat. Somehow, the kinetic energy from her blow had travelled through Emiya's body and simply vanished.

"What the hell are you ?!" she snarled, as she leapt back just in time to avoid a left hook that would have broken her jaw.

"Truth is, I haven't the faintest idea. This is the first time I can do this and not lose myself."

His wings beat once, and he was propelled forward. Bazett barely dodged his punch, bending under it before pushing on the ground with her right hand just in time to get herself out of a kick's way. He had some experience fighting unarmed, she decided, but nowhere near as much as her – it was his supernatural strength that made him a threat.

She pivoted on the ground, slamming her left heel into his temple with enough strength to turn stone into powder. The skin broke, but the skull held, and he didn't even groan before slapping her leg away. Bazett felt her ankle crack, and poured her od into Reinforcing her limb while powering through the sharp pain as she put some distance between the two of them and returned to her feet.

"You are strong," he said, looking at her while ignoring the trickle of blood running from his temple. As Bazett watched, the trickle slowed and stopped, revealing unbroken skin. She had hoped giving away the sheath would have deprived him of any healing factor he may possess, but apparently she had been wrong. "But know this, Bazett Fraga McRemitz : you will not hurt anyone else here today."

He held his right hand forward, and just like the sheath before, a huge sword materialized in his palm. It was huge, almost as tall as him – and yet, despite the weapon's ridiculous size, he wielded it as if it weighed nothing.

She caught his first blow, slapping her hands on the flat of the blade and stopping it dead – before he pulled the weapon free and went for another attack.

The size and weight of the weapon should have created openings after each strike, but he wielded it like a rapier, never over-extending himself. Bazett was fast enough that she could keep avoiding the blows, but being on the defensive wasn't going to win that fight. She needed to use her trump card, but there were conditions to that.

A pained cry drew her attention to the shed. The Tohsaka girl was clutching her chest in obvious discomfort, while the air around her was rippling with heat. Her eyes were glowing, as was the sheath she held against her sister's unconscious form.

Emiya's head briefly turned toward them, and his eyes widened in what Bazett was fairly certain was understanding.

"Dammit," he growled, turning back toward her. "I didn't want to do this, but so be it. This has gone on long enough. It ends now !"

He took his oversized sword in both hands, and switched to an overhead grip. The weapon started to glow as power was poured into its blade, and the black lines on Emiya's skin spread, running up from his hand and on the weapon. His wings grew in size, curling forward to cut off her retreat – and he charged, bringing his sword down in a diagonal arc.

If that attack hit her, she would surely die.

Got you, she thought. She extended her right arm, and the tube she had discarded at the beginning of her fight against the girls snapped open. A sphere of metal, imbibed with her own blood over a period of several weeks, jumped out of the container and locked in position next to her closed fist.

Prana coursed from her hand to the sphere, and a short blade erupted from it, inscribed with runes that had been old when Christianity had been born.

"Answerer," she shouted as Emiya's sword drew near, thrusting her Noble Phantasm to meet the attack head-on. "Fragarach !"

This was different, a small part of Shirou mused as he fought.

Twice before had Shirou drawn upon that power, which Rin believed came from some entity possessing him. Each time, his mind had … shifted gears, for lack of a better terms. He had done things in that state that he remembered, but his thoughts while he had been doing them had been unknown to him afterwards.

But not this time. Whether due to his newly forged bond with Rin and Sakura or some sort of epiphany brought upon by confronting the spectre of the Dark Angel, his mind was entirely his own this time. He could feel the power flowing from deep within him, where his soul and that of the Dark Angel were melded to one another in the supernatural heat of the Fire at the end of the last Grail War.

It hurt, but Avalon was healing the damage as soon as it appeared, and the excess power was vented out into Sakura's seemingly bottomless reserves, fuelling her own Traced copy of Avalon to heal her wounds.

Yet it was not enough. He was drawing too much power, and while only a sliver of it was pouring into Tohsaka through the connection they had forged, that fraction was enough to hurt her. He could not keep this battle going on too long, or she could get permanently hurt – she may even die, or lose her Circuits to overcharge. He could not accept that possibility, and so had sought to end the battle in a single blow. He didn't want to kill the Enforcer – her reasons for attacking them, while erroneous, weren't deserving of death – but if he had to choose between her life and Tohsaka's, the choice was all too easy to make.

Except the Enforcer had one trick up her sleeve, and as his sword met the short blade she had conjured out of that floating sphere of iron, Shirou realized that he had been played. His eyes took in the weapon even as his ears heard her speak its name, and time seemed to slow down as information flooded his mind.

This was more than mere Magecraft – this was a miracle from the Age of Gods, inherited down the generations by the descendants of those upon whom it had first been bestowed. He could see the history of the spell, imbued within the blade when McRemitz had crafted it and imbued it with her own blood. Even as the power of the Gods had faded from the World, the Fraga had preserved that one gift from the War God that they had once served.

This was a Noble Phantasm, the crystallization of a legend into a weapon. And this one was meant to serve as the ultimate counter-attack, designed to warp causality itself into a blade that would strike at the heart of the attacker before they could launch the attack that was used to trigger the Noble Phantasm.

With Avalon, Shirou may be able to survive a destroyed heart. The Everdistant Utopia was a Noble Phantasm too, after all. He doubted it very much, though, for it was likely Avalon wouldn't be able to regenerate a wound inflicted by a Noble Phantasm – not when the one using it wasn't the King of Knights. And even if he did survive, he would need immediate assistance, which McRemitz was unlikely to allow him.

The simple truth was, if Fragarach struck him down, he would die – or be forced to draw upon the Dark Angel's power to such an extant it may very well kill Rin, and transform him into the monster the Enforcer thought he already was.

Neither of those outcomes was acceptable, and so Shirou chose another.

For Fragarach was also called the Gouging Sword of the War God, and before Shirou's Incarnated eyes, its secrets were laid bare. He wouldn't have been able to explain them if asked – he wasn't a good enough Magus for that – but in that moment, he understood Fragarach in a way that not even the reclusive Fraga clan could claim to.

He saw McRemitz's blood, saw where the iron had been mined and the process through which it had been shaped by night after night of careful work. He saw the rituals calling upon the ancient pattern that the Noble Phantasm had engraved upon the World, deep enough that many versions of it could exist on Gaia at once, the subtle differences between each Mystic Code enough to bypass the law of unicity.

And at the core of it all, he saw the divine authority by which the deeper laws of the World were subverted. It was mighty, woven of knowledge beyond mortal ken and infused with the echoing power of a god who, despite having long since departed the World, yet exerted his will upon it through the Fraga, his servants' descendants.

But the shikome had been called the servant of a god too. The power of pestilence and rot it had served was nothing alike Lugh, the Irish god of war who had bestowed the knowledge of his Noble Phantasm upon the Fraga. The shikome had been a disease, a corruption of the natural order, while Lugh's authority and power existed within the confines of the World. Yet the arrogance of it – the self-claimed divine right, the claim that Lugh could do away with the laws the rest of them had to live by, simply because he was a god, and mortals had to accept it – was the same.

Anger flowed through Shirou, hot and heavy, spreading through his mind like a black tide of outrage. What right did that woman have to kill him ?! What right did she have to break into his home and hurt those he loved ?!

What right did Lugh's proxy have to judge him, based on the lies of self-serving magi ?

None. This was not fair. More than that, this was not just, and he would not accept it.

He would not.

In his hands, the Traced sword of a land of shadowed woods blazed with power, and a high keening sound emanated from the point where it met the unfolded blade of the Fragarach. It was the sound of the immovable object meeting the unstoppable force, and reality protested at the paradox becoming manifest. The power he had called upon was opposing Fragarach's properties, enforcing the proper chain of cause and effect. With burning golden eyes, Shirou saw the laws of the World twist and bend, unable to accommodate what was happening. But he did not relent.

He stared at McRemitz, who stared back with wide eyes, unable to believe what she was seeing – her invincible trump card being stopped, her assured victory being denied to her.

"What the Gods have wrought," he declared between gritted teeth, pouring his indomitable will into every syllable, "I will sunder."

On that final world, the sword he had Traced from the fragmented memories of a time before Istvaan broke through Bazett's Noble Phantasm. Shards of iron flew in all directions, burying themselves into the earth, while the great blade resumed its arrested motion. Shirou could not stop it, even if he had wanted to. With its terrible power expended to destroy Fragarach, the sword had returned to being a construct of Traced metal, devoid of the supernatural properties that had allowed him to destroy Zouken without hurting Sakura. It was in this state that he had used it for the entire duel, for despite her assault on Sakura and Tohsaka, Shirou knew the Enforcer was no true monster.

His blow hit, though the Fragarach had altered its course. A brief silence fell on the battlefield, before Bazett Fraga McRemitz's right arm hit the ground, cut off at the shoulder.

Rin watched with wide eyes as Emiya overcame a Noble Phantasm and took down one of the most powerful Enforcers in the Clocktower. The later wasn't unheard of – but the former was … before now, she would have laughed at the very notion. Noble Phantasms were the lingering echoes of mythical weapons, far more powerful than anything modern Magecraft could achieve.

The Fraga fell on the ground seconds after her arm, blood pouring from her wound. Emiya stumbled, and in the moment between one breath and the next, his wings were gone, and the black lines on his skin were receding.

Rin let out a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding. She had spared with Kirei before, and thought she had some inkling of what a fight between two Magecraft users specialized in combat looked like, but this … this had been something else entirely.

"Tohsaka," the red-haired teenager called out to her, kneeling at the side of the downed Enforcer. "She is still alive. I need your help."

After checking that the sheath Emiya had given her (and wait a minute, had he pulled out a Noble Phantasm out of his own body … or worse – or better – managed to duplicate something that had been crafted by the Fae ?!) was balanced against Sakura's unconscious body, Rin made her way to Emiya's side.

"She is still alive," he said, gesturing at the Enforcer. Her breathing was shallow, and she was losing blood, but she was still breathing, her eyes half-closed as the rest of her body twitched.

"Her Magical Circuits were caught in the backlash when I destroyed Fragarach, otherwise losing an arm wouldn't have stopped her," Emiya continued. "Tohsaka, can you stop the bleeding ? I can only maintain one copy of Avalon in my state, and pulling out the one inside me would take too long and leave me vulnerable if she has reinforcements."

She stared at him. Was he serious ? Of course he was.

"She hurt me," she said bluntly. "She hurt Sakura. And you want me to help her ? After she intruded into your home, after she tried to kill you or worse, bring you back to the Clocktower ?"

"Even so," he said, sounding tired. "I don't want her to bleed out in my backyard."

He gestured to the severed limb. "Besides, I think she has paid enough for that. Don't you ?"

She considered it. Part of her wanted nothing more than to let the woman bleed out and die, to pay for her transgressions against her family with her life. But the other, greater part of her knew that it would be a foolish and immature thing to do. The Enforcer had acted as the hand of someone else, a proxy in the petty grudges of the Association. Furthermore, killing an Enforcer, even if it was in self-defense, would put Emiya on the Clocktower's list – even more so than defeating one already inevitably would.

If she wanted to salvage this situation, she needed information, and the most obvious source was McRemitz.

"Fine," she snarled, before kneeling next to the downed Enforcer, examining her wounds with a critical eye. Emiya was right – the Fraga's Circuits were burning. It would take a long time, and the attention of someone better versed in the healing arts than her, to restore her ability to perform Magecraft. But she should be able to stabilize her, at least.

Normally she would need to use one of her pre-charged jewels, but she had prana to spare, thanks to her link to Emiya. In fact, her Magical Circuits were painfully overcharged, though now that no more was being added the excess was being syphoned off by Sakura. Before she started, however, there was something she had to do.

A pulse of magical energy was enough to make the Enforcer's eyes open wider, and another suppressed the pain long enough for her mind to clear. As she blinked up at Rin, the Tohsaka Head spoke to the Enforcer in a clear, concise voice, while weaving a complex piece of Magecraft around the two of them.

"Swear never to take up arms against Shirou Emiya, Sakura Matou and Rin Tohsaka," she said coldly. "Swear never to return to Japan once you leave it, save with our express permission. Swear it, or Root help me I will finish you off myself."

Rin heard Emiya shuffle, but he did not protest. It seemed even his mercy had limits.

"I swear," the Enforcer rasped, and Rin felt the geas click into place.

"Good. Now hold still while I save your miserable life."

The sun was halfway down to the horizon when Shirou returned inside his home, having finished cleaning up the traces of the battle. He had used Magecraft Tohsaka had taught him to repair the door to the shed and fill in the holes they had left in the garden. Before that, he had placed McRemitz's severed arm in an icebox – it was possible someone at the Clocktower could reattach it, though given what he had used to cut it off, it would probably be difficult.

He found Tohsaka sitting in the main room, glaring furiously at the phone. After they had put Sakura in one room and McRemitz in another – and locked the door from the outside with both mundane and magical means – Tohsaka had said she was going to call Kirei to ask him what the hell he had told the Enforcer and why.

Shirou had no idea how to act around her now. Since their first frank discussion after the Matou's demise, the two of them had become friends – or at least he liked to think so. But though his knowledge of relationships was limited to whatever his bond to Sakura should be called, he was fairly certain that her willingness to have sex with him in order to save his life meant something more. If she had been a more typical Magus, it may have simply been cold-hearted pragmatism at work, but he knew her better than that.

"Tohsaka," he called out to her.

"Rin," she snapped at him.

Shirou blinked. "Sorry ?"

"You have had a threesomewith me and my sister, I saved you from your od going crazy and tearing you apart from the inside, and you saved me from an Enforcer. Call me Rin, for God's sake."

She was blushing, but the set of her mouth and eyes told Shirou that he better agree or face a world of pain.

"Y-yes, Rin," he surrendered meekly, before valiantly rallying : "But call me Shirou, then."

For a few moments, the two teenagers remained silent, resolutely avoiding to look at one another, before Rin forged ahead :

"I ran some quick checks on the house. The Bounded Field held, so no one outside should have noticed anything, but it was a close thing. You will need to repair it."

"Sakura is the one who is responsible for that," he admitted. "I can barely create fields that warn me if someone cross them."

"That's a weakness," she chided him. "Bounded Fields are one of the few fields of Magecraft that your over-specialized nature don't preclude you from mastering. We will work on that later."

"Alright. What did Kirei say ?"

Her face, which had started to relax, immediately tensed again.

"He said he was 'worried about his former ward and pupil'. He mentioned something about having run into your father before, so when I told him about what happened between you and Zouken he thought that I may have 'fallen into the trap of the Magus Killer's heir'. As a result, when that Enforcer contacted him – apparently, the two of them had met before – he told her that there was a possibility you were using Sakura as some sort of hostage to enforce my obedience."

"Of course he did," sighed Shirou. "As if something like that would work on you. If I had tried that, you would have killed me a long time ago."

"Damn straight I would have," murmured Rin.

"He was complicit in an assault on the Second Owner," Shirou went on. "Can't you ask that he be replaced as Fuyuki's priest ?"

"The Church will claim that he had good reasons for his actions – and looking at it from their point of view, he did. I will be able to ask for reparations, but I doubt I can get him sacked." She looked at him, and must have seen something in his expression. "You really don't like him, do you ? I am a bit surprised. I mean, he is easy to hate, but you never even met him."

"My father told me that he should be dead, and that I should be very cautious wherever he is concerned. He also told me that under no circumstance should I go anywhere near his church."

"Well, far from me to question the wisdom of the fabled Magus Killer," she murmured.

The two of them were silent for a while. Shirou sat down opposite To-Rin, feeling the exhaustion in his body. The damage he had endured while fighting McRemitz had been healed, but Avalon did nothing for the fatigue. He would need to start cooking dinner soon – something light for Sakura and the Enforcer, and something else for him and Rin, in enough quantities to have leftovers for when the two injured recovered and needed more substantial fare.

Before that, though, there were more urgent problems to address.

"What do we do now ?"

"You are asking me that ?"

"You are the Second Owner of Fuyuki, and the one with the best knowledge of the Association's ways in this house. My first instinct is to send McRemitz back as soon as possible with a message to stay out of Fuyuki or else, but I think that may be because I spend too much time with the Fujimura Group."

"That would only make the problem worse in the long term. No, what I am going to do is send a message to the Head of the Archibalds asking them to either apologize and pay reparations of their own, or I will drag them before the Association's tribunals."

"I would rather not have my existence and secrets paraded before the Association," said Shirou worriedly.

"It won't come to that. The Archibalds are still on the brink of ruin after what happened to their Lord during the last Grail War. They are just beginning to rebuild their reputation – attacking us and failing in doing so will see them destroyed by their rivals in a matter of years. They will pay whatever I – whatever we ask of them to keep it quiet."

"And the Association will allow it ? It's one of their Enforcers they used for their play."

"Oh, I don't doubt some bribes will go that way too," Rin waved off. "In fact, I think it's likely that someone has been waiting for the Archibalds to over-extend in just that manner. Which is why we need to make contact with them : neither of us want this to go public." She smiled, and Shirou suppressed a shiver at how bloodthirsty she made the innocuous expression look. "But they don't know that, and I am going to make them pay for it. Between them and the Church's own compensation for Kirei's actions, my plans to redress my family's finances are going to jump ahead of schedule by years."

Somehow, despite the fact that they had tried to kill him, Shirou felt almost sorry for the Archibalds in that moment. Only almost, though – they had hurt Sakura and Rin, after all.

AN : To those who thought Bazett would end up in Shirou's harem : do you still think that now ?

I had to watch the entire Prisma anime just to write the fight scene. I hope you all appreciate what I am willing to do for you all - though I have to admit, that series is a lot darker than I was expecting ... though still lighter than the main ones, I suppose. And I am going to have to read through the translation for the Case Files novels in order to prepare the next one. I have already started, and let me warn you : I am not going to go as in-depth into the mechanics of Magecraft as that series does. Not yet, at least. I mostly need to read the series for inspiration on the Clocktower and the Association.

To those who are waiting impatiently for the Servants to appear : trust me, I understand. But, to quote the words of Iskandar Khayon, warlord of the Black Legion : "such a tale requires context". We are almost there, though. One more chapter, then we will have a timeskip to the first moves of the Grail War.

As usual, please tell me what you thought of this chapter and what you are expecting/would like to happen next.

Stay safe,

Zahariel out.