Chapter 10: The Last Disciple

"So, what is the plan?" Medea eventually asked. "So far, you've detailed how you intend to deal with what you say are the two biggest threats in the War, but you haven't given us much on how we're supposed to approach the War itself."

"Ah," I said. "Right. Yes. So."

"You do have a plan, don't you?" she asked with a saccharine condescension, smiling at me with just a touch of smugness. "After all, you said that you've had ten years to think about these things."

"Ten years against two-hundred," I said wryly. "Zouken has more experience in his pinky finger than I do my entire life. Any plan more complex than 'kill him when he least expects it' is almost certainly doomed to fail." I took a deep breath. "But yes. I do have something of a plan. It's not the greatest, it's not the most detailed, but it should hopefully be enough to get the job done."

"So?" Aífe prompted a little impatiently, staring at me with those sharp eyes of hers.

"There are a couple of things that have to go right, first." I tapped Shirou and Rin's pictures. "These two need to summon their Servants. They're one of my contingencies for the possibility of the three of us biting it. We have about a week before that happens — Rin should perform her summoning on the night of the thirty-first, Shirou on the night of the second. Rin's will be fairly mundane, we won't need to do anything except sit back and let it happen. Shirou's, on the other hand…"

Medea arched an eyebrow. "Is there something unusual about it?"

I sighed and rubbed the corner of one eye. "There's no easy way to put this: Emiya Shirou is a hack. He's barely third rate as a magus, and while he does exceedingly well in his specialty, he's basically incapable of anything else. That puts things in a bit of a hard spot, because he won't do a conventional summoning. It'll be a slap-dash emergency right as he's about to get killed by Lancer for the crime of being a witness."

Aífe clicked her tongue in distaste. She sounded almost disappointed.

"The Hound has fallen that far?"

"I'm not sure how familiar you are with his legend as a whole, but he's a 'chivalrous' sort, in the classical meaning of the word. He'll do any job that's handed to him by his 'lord,' no matter how distasteful, and complete it with everything he is, even if he hates it. He won't like killing what he thinks is an innocent bystander, but he'll still do it."

Aífe frowned and looked down towards the floor, muttering, "Yes, that does rather sound like the Hound, doesn't it?"

That was, after all, how she had lost her son. One of the biggest oversights of the myth, in my opinion, not saying anything about how she must have felt about that. It didn't seem like a good idea to pry into it just then, either.

"And this Emiya Shirou will manage some kind of emergency summon right as he's about to die?" Medea mused thoughtfully. I think she was imagining how that might work.

"He should." I sighed and tapped the box holding the cloak. "That's why we need the cloak. In order to ensure that the situation develops such that Shirou will perform that accidental summoning, it might be necessary to, shall we say, nudge things into going the right direction. Having Rider there to do the nudging could mean the difference between Shirou's life and death, and Shirou's life and death will almost certainly mean the difference between Saber being summoned and available to aim at the Grail and not appearing at all. Or worse, appearing under the command of someone far less predictable and far less within our ability to manipulate, as well."

This War's version of Ryuunosuke. It was true that there were limits to the kind of person Saber would accept as her Master, but unless I was remembering wrong, she had relaxed her standards quite a bit after the sting of the last War's failure.

"So you want to make sure these two summon their Servants, first." Medea hummed, noncommittal. "They're your contingency, you said. And what about afterwards? What's next in this grand plan of yours?"

"Watching and preparing," I said. "It's not going to be the most glorious or exciting part, but most of the War should be our group stockpiling resources, preparing countermeasures to the enemy Servants and Masters, and making sure nothing unmanageable happens. Then, when we're ready and the situation is as ideal as it's going to get, we go into the Matou mansion and kill Zouken first."

"Not Kirei?" asked Aífe.

My mouth pulled into a tight line. "Kirei is the more manageable threat of the two. He's also content to sit around and not do much of anything until the end of the War draws closer. No, Zouken is the one more likely to screw things up, so Zouken is the one who needs to die first."

"There's also the problem of catching the attention of Gilgamesh should we target Kirei first," Medea added slyly. "According to you, at least."

I rolled my shoulders uncomfortably. "How much Gilgamesh will get involved for Kirei's sake is something I honestly don't know. I'm inclined to say that he wouldn't, if only because the only participant in the War he actually cares about is Saber, but if Kirei asks for assistance or we hit the church directly…"

The memories were murky. There was a clear scene in my head of Kirei's shocked face and Cúchulainn's spear piercing his black heart, but the timeline on where exactly Gilgamesh would have been at that very moment wasn't at all clear to me. I wanted to say he'd been playing the role of Shinji's Servant at the time, because that was the only reason I could imagine for him not squashing Medea when she kicked Kirei out of the church during the Unlimited Blade Works series of events.

"We don't want to tickle the sleeping dragon, if we can avoid it," I settled on. "Kirei and Gilgamesh are predictable, in the end. It's not too hard to figure out what they'll do or how they'll react. Zouken is twice as cruel and three times as conniving. He's far less predictable and far more inclined to come at us from an angle, and the instant he sees an opening, he'll take it. That's why he has to go first."

Plus, Kirei and Gilgamesh could both be beaten by Shirou and Saber and Rin and Archer. Bazett would crush Kirei in a straight fight, and she was another of my contingencies. There was no need to worry that Kirei and Gilgamesh might win.

None of them, however, knew how to beat Zouken. None of them could. He wasn't an enemy who could be destroyed with raw power or overwhelming force. He was the sort you needed to hit with a single, unexpected attack at his one, critical weakness, stripping his defenses bare. This team was the only one with both the means and the knowledge necessary to do that.

"And so the dagger…" Medea murmured.

"I can't think of any other way of getting around the rather inconvenient fact that Zouken's soul is currently in a thousand or more pieces."

An exorcist might work, but the only exorcist in town was Kirei, and I didn't like my odds of manipulating him into killing Zouken, not without tipping my hand to him.

"Where exactly do I fit into these plans of yours, Master?" Aífe asked bluntly. "I'm to be the hand you use to guide these events, you say, but there are a great many Heroic Spirits who might perform that job just as well, and yet you intended to summon me specifically. Why?"

Ah, right…

I took a deep breath and reclined into the cushioned back of my chair.

How to approach this one without offending her…

Well, she was an Irish warrior, the rough and tumble sort who could fight you one minute and an hour later, share a beer and a good time with you, and that sort of subculture tended to attract specific kinds of personalities. If she was the kind of woman that Cúchulainn liked and appreciated, to the point he was tempted to stay with her instead of going back to Emer…

"I need a teacher," I decided on. Blunt and honest were probably the best way of getting her on my side. "Like I said, Kirei outclasses me in every metric as a combatant. If I want to fight him myself instead of asking one of you to do it for me, then I need to be better, stronger, and more skilled, and I need to get there in less than two weeks."

I gestured to her. "You were the option I liked best. To my understanding, your sister is still technically alive and won't ever die, so she can't be summoned, and Chiron might be a pretty good option, but he steals the Archer class from Rin, and Rin needs to be the one to summon Archer. Your legend also has a tutelary aspect to it, and your horses and chariot are tied tightly to your myth. Getting you as a Rider kept all of the other important parts where I needed them to be."

I offered her a smile. "Plus, I always liked your story, as sparse and fragmentary as it was. It's not many women who can hand the chief hero his ass on a silver platter, even if you technically lost in the end."

Her answering grin was shark-like. "No, it's not." There was a predatory gleam in her eyes. "So I didn't misunderstand you earlier. What you're saying is that you want me to teach you the martial arts of the ancient Celts."

My heart skipped a beat. I swallowed against my own excitement. "If you'll have me," I demurred, "then yes. Are you willing to train one last disciple?"

She chuckled, low and almost sinister as she leaned forward, folding her hands together in front of her face. Her eyes seemed to gleam in the light of the old, yellow bulbs that lit up the room.

"A week, you said?" she asked rhetorically. "Two, before you think you might need to use it. The timeline will be tight, but I think I can turn you into a proper warrior before then."

One way or another, I heard, even if she didn't say the words aloud.

"And after we kill Zouken?" Medea interrupted, sounding less than enthused. "Are we to sit around on our laurels and wait for the rest of the Servants and Masters to kill each other, then swoop in to finish off this Kirei you're so worried about?"

I sighed and leaned forward, propping myself up on my knees. That was actually probably her preferred way of doing things, scheming in the background and moving cautiously, so what was actually bothering her was probably more to do with not making any moves at all on the other Masters and Servants.

"It's not the most glamorous thing," I agreed. "Unfortunately, the more directly involved we get, the more we expose ourselves, and the more we expose ourselves, the more attention we'll draw. The last thing we want is to pique Gilgamesh's interest too early."

I slanted her a look. "Besides, Caster, I thought you were more the scheming type than the take action type. Aren't you the kind of person who exemplifies the idea that behind every great man is a great woman?"

Her lips pursed and two spots of red grew on her cheeks. Deliberately, I forced myself not to smile.

There was an ordinary woman behind the venom and the ice. As ordinary a woman as she could be with how inhuman her ancestry was, at least. Her heart was hardened and she had put up so many walls that it was going to be a task and a half to worm my way through them, but she wasn't unreachable. Of course not — if a brick wall like Kuzuki-sensei could earn her affection with simple sincerity through no intentional effort, then could I not do so as well?

"In any case," I went on, "I don't have some grand, complicated plan micromanaging every step and every milestone that has to be achieved in order for the rest of it to come together. It's a fool's errand and a waste of precious time. Instead, I've got a series of prerequisites that must be met and a handful of strategies for dealing with each threat in the War. Hopefully, that will be enough."

"And if it isn't, you have your contingencies," said Aífe. She gestured to the pictures of Shirou and Rin. "These two children, as it were."

One of my eyebrows rose. "Technically, I'm a child, too, by that standard."

That was one of Gilgamesh's complaints, as I remembered it. That the Fourth Grail War was a grand battle between great heroes, and the Fifth was being fought by women and children.

"Only in the strictest sense," was Aífe's answering grin.

A breath huffed out of my nostrils, not quite a snort. That was the trouble, wasn't it? I'd spent the last ten years feeling like I was in my twenties and dealing with the disconnect between that and a body that was still going through puberty. That disconnect, the dysphoria resulting from the incongruence from how a significant part of me expected to look and how I actually looked had really screwed with me for quite a while.

There was no need to mention how much more awkward that had made being a teenager.

"So these two are one of your contingencies," Medea began, "and this Bazett woman is another?"

"She is," I confirmed. "In a straight fight? She can probably beat Kirei."

Something like, Bazett was stronger now, but the Kirei from ten years ago was more powerful overall? Well, one guy was "disqualified" because it was like an athlete caught using performance enhancers, Kuzuki could win as long as his style wasn't known, but of the Masters in the Fifth, Bazett was the best pure fighter.

I might have had a use for Kuzuki…if I could trust that he wouldn't sweep Medea off her feet entirely on accident. That would be an embarrassing way to miss her betrayal, underestimating the "power of true love." That was on the Evil Overlord list somewhere, wasn't it? Well, I guess it had some kind of application here, too.

Aífe's eyebrows rose skeptically. "Really, now? The same Kirei that you said is a superhuman martial artist?"

I hid a smile behind another sip of my tea. "So is she. She makes up for whatever gap might exist between their respective skill levels with Rune Magic woven into her clothes. Gilgamesh's defeat, I can entrust to those two and their Servants. Kirei's, I can trust Bazett to handle."

"And Zouken?" Medea asked.

I grimaced. "Zouken is the one threat that we definitely have to handle ourselves."

There was only one other person who would technically be capable of dealing with Zouken more permanently, but even that situation required things to go a certain way before he was vulnerable enough for Sakura to deal the final blow. And Sakura had to be in a bad state for it to happen, too.

Neither of those was something I could put into motion myself. For a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that it required breaking my little sister.

"And if we can't?" Medea asked pointedly.

"We have to," I countered. "It's not a matter of want, Caster. There are literally three parties in this War capable of dealing with Zouken in a permanent sense. We're one. Another is Kirei, and I don't think I need to explain why it can't be him. The third requires jumping through half a dozen hoops and breaking so many things and too many people to be reliable or desirable." I jabbed my finger against my knee painfully to punctuate each word of the next sentence. "It. Has. To. Be. Us."

Medea didn't look happy about what I was saying, but at last, scowling all the while, she relented and agreed. "Very well. You said the method we have to use to kill him has to work on a distributed soul."

I sighed and leaned back into my chair, giving her a nod. "Right. Like I said, his soul is distributed across his blood worm familiars. Even if we destroyed his body, he'd just move his consciousness to another familiar, consume more biomass — probably in the form of the closest unsuspecting bystander he can find — and attack us when we least expected it."

I gestured again to the dagger.

"That's why I said we need to take advantage of the one and only opening he'll give us to kill him in one blow. If we can't kill him with the first shot, then he's almost guaranteed to win. Doubly so if he actually summons Assassin himself, because with his Noble Phantasm, Hassan of the Cursed Arm can kill anyone in the War, including both of you, with nothing more than a single touch."

Aífe's brow furrowed and her lips drew down. "How?"

"Delusional Heartbeat." I made a grasping motion with one hand, then clenched it into a fist. "It uses sympathetic magecraft to replicate your heart, and when he crushes the replica, your own heart will be crushed, too."

Medea straightened in her seat and Aífe's hand flew to her chest, right over where her heart should be.

"It goes straight through magic resistance," I added. "Saber might be able to survive it, under the right circumstances, but without her other Noble Phantasm, I wouldn't bet on it."

The both of them grimaced, and I left out one of the most important points: the only way to guarantee that Cursed Arm Hassan wouldn't descend on us immediately would be to make Zouken think I was there alone.

And so I would actually have to be there alone, with Aífe and Medea watching from as close by as I could feasibly have them without being detected.

"The good news is," I went on, "as long as we fight him on our terms instead of letting him dictate a time and place where he can set up an ambush, Assassin is an enemy that either of you should be able to defeat without much trouble."

"And if Zouken is killed first, then Assassin won't be a problem at all, will he?" Medea asked archly.

A smile pulled at the corners of my mouth. Medea huffed, because I'd just confirmed her suspicions.

"Would the same hold true for Gilgamesh?" Aífe asked.

The smile fled my face, and a sigh hissed out of my mouth.

"Would that it did," I answered. "Gilgamesh's Independent Action skill is just too high. Strictly speaking, keeping his contract with Kirei is just a matter of whim. Little more than mitigating a minor inconvenience. He doesn't need it at all."

Medea blew a huff out past her lips. "So he'll be a thorn in our side no matter what."

Quite a bit more than a thorn, I didn't say, and wasn't that the understatement of the year. The sentiment was true either way.

"King Arthur as Saber, a nameless Guardian for Archer, Culann's Hound as Lancer, myself as Rider," Aífe mused. She cast a glance at Medea. If she had any suspicions about Medea's identity, it didn't show on her face. "You as Caster, Cursed Arm Hassan as Assassin… That would leave Herakles as Berserker."

I blinked at her. "I hadn't mentioned that?"

"Perhaps," she allowed carefully, "but you must admit, there is much you've dropped on us all at once."

"Fair," I agreed. "In that case, yes, Herakles is Berserker. I think I mentioned that he has a stock of twelve resurrection spells? And of course, his Noble Phantasm will adapt with each death, so the only way to beat him is to kill him in twelve unique ways, each one needing to be at least an A-Rank attack, or else use something so devastating that it takes multiple lives in one go."

Medea let out a long breath that wasn't quite a sigh, dropping her chin into the palm of one gloved hand. "Yes, you did mention something like that. And how is it that you intend to defeat him if it comes down to it?"

"Throw Saber at him," I answered bluntly.

"Master!" Medea said, exasperated. "I'm serious! How are we going to beat Herakles if we have to?"

I wasn't smiling, and I wasn't laughing.

"I'm serious, too," I told her. "The best thing to do is to stay out of Illyasviel's way and off her radar long enough for Saber to kill him first. There is literally no way for us to beat him. The best we can hope to do is to stalemate him long enough for Illyasviel to get bored and leave."

I couldn't remember clearly how Herakles was beaten normally. The scene of Gilgamesh skewering him, that remained crystal clear, just because of how striking it was, and I couldn't forget how the Shadow had swallowed him in the Heaven's Feel scenario, but the only certainty I had for how he was beaten by Saber was that it involved Shirou, projection magecraft, and Saber's sword.

However you looked at it, the best option for dealing with Herakles was to let someone else deal with Herakles. Saber was the only one we could direct in any meaningful way.

"Well, I don't know about that, Master." Aífe grinned a bloodthirsty grin. "If Herakles and his Master want to test themselves against my fists, then I'd be only too happy to oblige."

"Let's…call that a method of last resort," I said politely. Aífe just chuckled and leaned back.

It was becoming clear to me that I'd underestimated exactly how much I was going to have to juggle her personality and whims, as well. Medea, I'd tried my best to account for. She was a known quantity. Not wholly predictable, but understandable enough that I thought I had a good grasp on how she thought and how she might act.

Aífe, on the other hand… In hindsight, I knew virtually nothing about her personality. Intellectually, I might have known she was her own person, but my plans had only ever accounted for her doing exactly what I wanted from her. I'd been thinking of her almost like she was a machine whose levers I could pull and control.

Sloppy, Yukio. Very sloppy.

"You realize that it's not just Herakles or Gilgamesh that we might wind up facing unexpectedly," Medea pointed out mulishly. She crossed her arms and her legs both. "What if we encounter Saber or Archer at an unexpected moment? Or perhaps this Kirei you find so intimidating sends his pet hound to sniff out our trail. What then?"

"Pet hound," Aífe repeated to herself, chuckling softly under her breath. "I'll have to hold onto that one…"

"Saber and Archer shouldn't be a problem," I said confidently.

"Oh?" Medea arched an eyebrow, looking down her nose at me. "Are you that familiar with the weaknesses of King Arthur and a nameless Heroic Spirit who can replicate Noble Phantasms?"

Implying that they really had weaknesses, aside from their respective neuroses. But the hero Emiya had proven that he was perfectly capable of putting aside his own goals if the situation was dire enough, and Saber's buttons would be virtually impossible for me to press.

There was no Lancelot here to weigh on her heart.

"Well, yes, but that's also not why I don't think they're an issue," I hedged. "It's because their Masters won't even consider the possibility that I myself am a Master until far too late in the game for it to matter. I told you, Caster, that's the biggest advantage we have in this War: I know the hands everyone else has been dealt and no one else even realizes I'm part of the game."

"And how are you so sure of that?" Medea pressed insistently. "What reason would any of these other competitors have to dismiss you so easily?"

Aífe chuckled, because she'd apparently already come to the right conclusion. "Because he's spent the last ten years convincing them that he wouldn't take part even if he had the chance."

Medea startled, looked at Aífe, then back at me, her eyebrows rising up behind her bangs. "What?"

I gave her a half-hearted shrug and a grim smile.

"I've positioned myself optimally," I agreed, because I really had, and I hadn't even realized I'd done it at first. "Kotomine Kirei already knows I wish him dead, but he thinks it's an impotent hate. He'll be amused if he ever does find out, but hopefully, by then, it won't matter. As for Rin and Shirou, neither of them think I have any interest in the Grail itself or its wishing power. When the time comes for them to start looking into other potential Masters, they'll disregard me entirely. If everything else goes right, they won't even find out I'm a participant until near the end."

Medea goggled at me, her voice filled with stunned disbelief. "They think you don't have anything you would use an omnipotent wish-granting device for?"

I shrugged. "Rin and Shirou don't have wishes, either," I told her. "Rin's in it for her family's glory, so that she can bring prestige to her lineage. If she actually won, she'd probably just wish for money. Shirou…" Well, it wasn't that he didn't have a wish, so much as he would never actually choose to make it, if he had the chance. "Shirou is a survivor of the fire ten years ago. His reason for participating is to stop it from happening again."

"I'm sure Saber will be thrilled when she finds out," Aífe remarked with another grin.

"Won't she just?" Medea purred, her lips curling into a wicked smile. It would have looked a lot more intimidating if her hood was up.

At that moment, the clock on the wall struck the hour and let out low, resonant chimes, and when I glanced over at it, a jolt of shock rippled through my gut as I realized exactly how long we'd been sitting there talking.

"It's already nine o'clock?" I asked the air.

I checked my watch, too, just to make sure, and sure enough, it told me the exact same thing. Well, shit.

Hurriedly, I downed the rest of my tea and set the saucer and cup on the table.

"Something wrong, Master?" asked Aífe.

"What's so special about nine o'clock?" Medea added.

"I meant to check on Bazett an hour ago," I told them both as I stood quickly. I'd already taken three steps towards the hallway before I remembered my manners, stopped myself, and turned briefly back to them. "Sorry, we'll have to continue this later. I have a patient I need to go and make sure is still breathing."

That was all I gave the two of them before I rushed off towards the stairs. Behind me, Medea huffed, and loud enough for me to hear, muttered, "I guess it's a poor contingency plan that dies before you even have a need for it."

Well, yes, that was true, but…

No, I was just as softhearted as my sister. It might be better to let Medea think that of me for now, that it was just cold pragmatism that drove my concern, but at the end of the day, I didn't have it in me to let someone die just like that. Not when there was something I could do about it.

Perhaps that was a flaw the two of us twins shared. In the end, neither of us had the ice in our veins that a true magus was supposed to, and so we both did foolish things out of compassion.

After all, only an idiot would think that a woman like Bazett Fraga McRemitz could be any kind of contingency plan.

— o.0.O.O.0.o —

NOTES

Surprise! The final infodump chapter. Ugh, I kept this going on so long that even I wound up forgetting exactly what had already been covered in 8 and 9, despite rereading them whenever I'd been away from this for too long.

Chapter 11 is where things start to get moving again. 8, 9, and 10 wound up covering and establishing a good chunk of Yukio's metaknowledge, including the fact that it's incomplete and sometimes incorrect. 11 kind of scaffolds off of it to show where the plans are going to take them next, and then 12 is putting them into action.

Chapter 13 isn't quite done yet, but it'll give a little more buildup to things before I start skipping ahead again. 14 is where I'm going to have some fun with a few things, and 15 is probably the last chapter before the Grail War actually starts.

As always, read, review, and enjoy.