King of Phantasms: Thank you, I hope you like this new chapter.

Zerak: Thank you. The answer to your two questions can be found in Chapter 2. I explain how Archer survived the end of the Grail War. I also explain that "Rin gave something irreplaceable to Shirou"... and there the redhead blushes (I think everyone will have understood).

Warm Welcome Reception

Still standing on top of the Center Building, Archer continued to monitor the two Super-Hawks fighter/bomber. The crafts returned to Fuyuki for a new pass. However, they strayed into a sharp evasive maneuver. Guided by his fighting instinct, the Servant in red turned...

A beautiful and strange flying object had just appeared above the ruins of Kotomine Church. It was some golden and emerald ark shaped like an arrowhead. And as Archer focused on the strange appearance... he discovered that it was a sort of... flying throne. The royal armchair was in the center of the UFO, on a raised platform and surrounded by splendid red draperies.

The flying throne graciously spread wings resembling stained-glass cathedral windows made of green glass before accelerating to an inconceivable speed and disappearing westward.

But Archer had time to see who was sitting on the throne...

[Rin, I just saw Gilgamesh. He went off to China (1), aboard a flying Noble Phantasm called Vimana: Throne of the Heaven-soaring King. I...]

He stopped talking. He had mechanically grasped one of the poles supporting the position lights surrounding the helipad. In the grinding of tortured metal, he had just crushed it with one hand.

His eyes widened with surprise...

Like all Servants, his physical strength far exceeded that of an ordinary man. But the hero EMIYA had not been summoned as Berserker... and he had not squeezed that hard.

Except that...

They were now in a different universe, a universe saturated with magical energy...
[Rin. Tell Saber to be very careful! Our abilities have changed in this new universe and the strength of a Servant is amplified. ]

In the Emiya Residence, Tohsaka Rin looked at her cup of tea spilled on the floor and the kotatsu lying broken into two pieces. She sighed:

[Archer, next time, let me know sooner.]

The Red Devil then turned to Artoria, who looked at the broken table, her hands clenched on her chest and blushing with confusion:

"Saber... according to Archer, your abilities have been strengthened by your arrival in another dimension. You are stronger... as you have just made a dazzling demonstration... I will have to examine you as soon as we have a little time. For now, watch your anger outbursts."

Saber nodded without saying a word. With her head down, her eyes disappearing behind the fringe of her hair, she seemed truly contrite. Of course, for Rin, such behavior was like spilling blood in a shark-infested sea... She was a mischievous girl at heart, so she loves teasing serious people... Throwing one of her twintails over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed and she giggled while hiding her mouth:
"Are you imitating Shirou? He's usually the one who does anything without thinking. Archer must be right, his clumsiness is contagious!"

Saber straightened, her eyebrows furrowed:

"Rin."
As for Shirou, sitting on the other side of the broken table, he rubbed the back of his skull and laughed in an awkward manner... as usual with Rin, everything was his fault...

But the Tohsaka heiress had already moved on. She had picked up a piece of the broken table and slightly cut her finger. She deposited some drops of blood on the fragment and reached out to the rest of the debris:

"Minuten vor Schweiben!"

The kotatsu's fragments gathered together and reformed the table as if it had never been broken.
It was not the first time Shirou saw Rin use this "basic" Magecraft (according to her!) but he was still impressed by her talent.

When his girlfriend opened her eyes, however, she seemed troubled and then pensive:

"Um... Saber's strength is not the only thing affected by our change of universe."

"What do you mean, Rin," asked Shirou.

"My Magecraft... I don't really know how to say... Maybe my Magecraft is more efficient or the Prana expenditure is lower... or is it the transformation of Od into Prana that is more effective... no it's not that either... I think..."

She paused, her fist in front of her lips, her hand on her belly...

"Yes, I think that's it. During the Age of Gods, the ambient Mana was used for magic. After the end of this era, to face the scarcity of Mana, King Solomon created the Magic Circuits. The Magic Circuits refine the Od (the inner magical energy, manifestation of the soul) to transform it into Prana ('free' magical energy, in the sense of exploitable magical energy)... this method allowed the appearance of Magecraft, an inferior form of magic that could be used by the Magi in a low-Mana environment. Nevertheless, the weak remaining Mana is still a small part of the energy that the Magic Circuits transform into Prana. Normally, even in the vicinity of a leyline, the transformed Mana constitutes a maximum of 5% of the Prana used in Magecraft. But we are now in a universe where the ambient Mana rate is hundreds of times higher than in our original dimension! We only need Od to open our Magic Circuits... The ambient Mana is enough to provide all the Prana needed for our Magecraft."

Tohsaka Rin was amazed by what she had just discovered. An inner voice told her that she should jump for joy. Access to such power had been the dream of generations of Magi... including her father. But, only a reflex cultivated since childhood prevented her from showing fear. She was a Tohsaka! Whatever the situation, Rin had to appear strong in front of the others.

Having access to such power, the inhabitants of this universe must have been seasoned Magi... capable of using True Magic! There were no more than five to seven True Magicians in their original universe and each of them had taken centuries to reach such a level of completion. Here, the inhabitants had to teach True Magic to... to children! Not to mention that such an inexhaustible energy reservoir as this world provided a viable environment for the most powerful Phantasmal Species... and... even gods!

As Rin was immersed in deep reflection, Shirou turned to Artoria:

"Saber, why did you show such anger when Tohsaka spoke of Gilgamesh's Flying Throne?"

The Servant of the Sword shudders and her face closed.

She remembered a night fight, a horrible sea monster threatening to destroy Fuyuki and especially... the F-15 that Berserker Lancelot had transformed into a pseudo-Noble Phantasm to face the Vimana during a breathtaking dogfight.

Lancelot...
The best of her knights...

Her friend...

King Arthur sighed and forced herself to smile:

"I remembered a bad memory. I have already seen Gilgamesh using this Noble Phantasm during the Fourth Grail War. But, it will be time to worry about it when the King of Heroes returns. We have more immediate concerns."

It was a way of saying she didn't want to talk now and Shirou had spent enough time with Saber to understand that. He nodded, not without having sent her a worried look.

Archer continued to guard the highest building in Shinto. He particularly watched the Super-Hawks returning to Fuyuki.

However, other aerial vehicles were now running over the city.

They were small... too small to have a crew. Drones propelled by a small reactor at the rear, a hover-pod ensuring elevation. The craft could both reach a supersonic speed where it could stop and float in the air. Its nose was a transparent dome filled with cameras and various detectors.

Utilizing his Structural Grasp Magecraft Archer "read" the drone:

Maker: Republic of Japan

Type: drone Teisatsuki (Prowler)

Year of Manufacture: 107 P.A.

Archer startled... P.A. was the abbreviation for Post Apocalypse Calendar! What did that mean?

As two new aerial fighters flew over Fuyuki, Archer focused on them:

Maker: Australian Tech-cities

Type: Australian one-man flyer

Year of Manufacture: 106 and 109 P.A.

He also discovered the users of the two flying machines... warm-blooded lizards with five eyes. These "Horunes" were plunderers and slavers who sacrificed victims to a dark deity of the seas.

He focused on his mental connection with Tohsaka:

"Rin, we have a big problem..."

If Archer had not been occupied by the various aerial vehicles that were inspecting Fuyuki, he would have discovered what a strange thing was happening at the edge of the city. Before the opening of a Rift ripped Fuyuki from the Fateverse, pipes, cable ducts, and a fiber-optic network connected the city to the rest of Japan.

Now, the concrete ducts were cut clean at the edge of the city. From these dark holes came swarms of insects with sharp teeth and bladed tails and legs known as Blade Wing Worms. They're not natural creatures but an evolution of the Crest Worms... the Magecraft of the Matou family.
The insects were scattered in all directions, directed by an iron will, the will of a man who had cheated death for five centuries!

Under the Matou residence was a vast dark and sinister hypogeum from which converged multiple concrete galleries. An old man dressed in a green and brown kimono without drawing was leaning on a cane in the center of the hall. His bald head and almost entirely black eyes made him look like Nosferatu, the vampire of the masterpiece of German expressionist cinema.

His Magecraft allowed him to control the insects that swarmed at his feet or on the concrete walls as if it were part of his own body... which, in fact, was really the case!

The Blood Worms (a subspecies of Crest Worms) have come to make up the body of Matou Zouken in his attempt to prolong his life. His existence is essentially a conglomerate of Crest Worms with a special appetite for human flesh and blood that combines themselves to take a human form.

Sharing the primitive emotions of his insects, Zouken urged them to scatter ever further to make a reconnaissance of the surroundings.

Through the eyes of one of his little protégés, he saw a thing appear, misshaped but radiant with magical energy. This improbable thing wasn't just floating on the ocean. It was moving at full speed...a ship.

The monster called Matou Zouken smiled... the next moment, he was breaking into a stream of insects that rushed into one of the galleries.

The Horune's vessels had a strange shape often compared to that of a diving whale. That is, the front looked like a sort of big bag higher than wide but the upper deck extended aft where it takes a shape similar to that of the tail of a whale. The space between the top of the "bag" and the "fins" of the tail was arranged in a sort of terrace bordered by antennae or perhaps flagpoles... in any case long points of different shapes and heights. Fei Fong Li the Geo-Immortal stood here on the upper deck of Horune's Dream Ship.

The Geomancer concentrated on the leyline which circulated on the surface of the water. With his eyes closed, he bathed in the circulating Mana. From a thought, he could have disappeared... teleporting to another point of the same leyline. But for the time being, he was simply seeking to perceive.

He can sense any major natural disasters currently happening along the line, such as forest fire, flooding, hurricane or earthquake. He can also sense the presence of a xue (dragon's lair, or Nexus for Westerner, the point where two leylines intersect).

Fei Fong Li was quivering.

He had just felt the use of magic...

So the Rift brought them, wise men...

But it wasn't just that. He felt two presences... very powerful supernatural creatures.

A D-bee (a humanoid from another dimension) appeared, entering through a door leading inside the ship. He wore a plate and mail armor with a loincloth and the holster of a handgun was at his hip. His arms and legs were bare green scaled skin, with claws to his hands and feet.

His appearance was somewhat near-human but the reptilian D-bee had a muzzle without lips, three small eyes in the forehead, and two eye-stalks on both sides of the head.

He was a Horune, his name was Blue Dream Singer, the leader of Okinawa's Horunes pirates.

"I just got a message from my scouts. They haven't discovered the creature you're looking for on the other side of the Rift... but an entire city appeared."

He opened his eyes:

"Yet I feel the presence of two powerful supernatural creatures."

The Horune uttered a kind of mocking glee:

"Maybe you exaggerated, we just wanted the creatures... not the rest of the city."

The immortal turned a cold gaze at his interlocutor:

"The opening of a Rift is not an exact science. Each Rift is a special case and there are no rules, no one can predict what will happen."

If Fei Fong Li had said that in front of Shogun Tietsin, the latter would probably have given up such a dangerous plan. But Li served the Otomo shogunate only because it served the interests of his true master. And he didn't care about the consequences of his actions...

The humanoid reptile looked at him coldly:

"But that doesn't solve our problem."

"What problem are you talking about," asked the Geomancer.

"You forgot... it must be the effect of old age, I guess... you may be immortal but your brain is starting to come out through the ears!"

The Geo-immortal held his anger, he was immortal... not invincible, and he was on the flagship of Blue Dream Singer.

"Spare me your bad jokes, what's the problem you're talking about?"

"We're here for a diversion, remembering?"

"Oh, this..."

The Horune looked at the Geo-immortal and grumbled with disgust:

"Well, I see I'm in charge. We're going to attack the city. The Republicans will come running to defend it and will be given enough to rebuild and protect to keep them busy for a while."

Fei Fong Li stood up and called the Horune leader as he was about to return to his command post:
"Blue Dream Singer, don't forget, I felt the presence of two very powerful supernatural creatures. There are also magicians... and this place is very special. It looks like there's a dam on the secondary Dragon Road as if something's interfering with Mana's flow... or rather as if we're accumulating it. I feel that a very powerful magical ritual is at work in this city."

The leader of the pirates of Okinawa uttered a little scream... the equivalent of a laugh:

"So potential price slaves and maybe some interesting magic trinkets. I'm not going to complain."

Li watched him closing the access hatch. The Geomancer must have been in a great moment of goodness for having warned this boor of the dangers that awaited him... and he had not listened. Fei Fong Li had a cold smile... but he didn't care if there were fewer Horune on Earth tonight.

The entire conversation had been listened to with interest by winged insects that had landed on several antennae.

A word of particular interest caught the attention of Matou Zouken: "Immortal".

The Ittō-kūi Yamakawa Yukio piloted one of two Super-Hawks that rotated over the strait separating Kyushu Island from Shikoku. A town rifted to Earth was already a disturbing situation, but the presence of the Horunes, and their visible interest in the event, made him foresee a catastrophe. His forehead was wet with bad sweat. He kept his eyes on the Horunes' flyers, ready to lift the small hood insulating the fire button of his joystick.

In his headphones, his teammate was in conversation with the Taiyo, asking for instructions.
Finally, they heard the Ittō-kūsa, (Air Colonel 1st Class) Oyama Ikuo, the Taiyo's CAG (Commander Air Group):
"Devil Hand, Red Sword, you are authorized to respond to the first hostile act committed by the Horunes against you or the inhabitants of the city. If you need backup, a squadron is on stand-by. Confirm!"

"Ryokei (roger)" confirmed Yamakawa Yukio and Hasegawa Miki.

Nevertheless, Captain Yamakawa dared the question that had been bothering him since he had seen the strange golden UFO leave the city:

"Taiyo, this is Devil Hand, what if it's the townspeople shooting at us?"

"Devil Hand, this is Taiyo, in which case I'm counting on your common sense. We have received readings from the Supernatural Network Sensor, and are aware that there are two supernatural entities of great power in this city. Nevertheless, nothing proves their hostility... and we are not here to provoke them! Moreover, until proven otherwise, this is a Japanese city inhabited by the civilians that we have sworn to protect. I will not tolerate collateral casualties! Did I make myself clear? "

"Ryokei, receive loud and clear."

Five minutes later, the two Super-Hawks informed the Taiyo that the Horunes were approaching the rifted town. Taiyo had been trying for several hours to get in touch with the pirates, warning them not to attack the populations of the Japanese's archipelago under penalty of retaliation. But the Horunes turned a deaf ear to the radio waves.

At the same time, the radio operators of the Multi-Role Amphibious Assault Ship had managed to contact three radio stations broadcasting from the rifted town: the fire station, the hospital, and the police station. They learned that the city was called Fuyuki and that the inhabitants were panicked, not understanding what had happened to them. They had just spent several days cut off from everything "in a white mist"... Having experienced the same thing, the crew members had no trouble understanding that they had crossed limbo.

An emergency think tank grouped around the head psychologist on board began to explain to them (gently) that they were now on Rifts Earth.

Captain Yamakawa and Sergeant Hasegawa made another passage, voluntarily cutting off a group of flyers heading towards Fuyuki.

And the battle began at that moment...

Laser beams fired by one of the flyers grazed Yamakawa's craft. As the captain launched an evasive maneuver, Hasegawa selected infrared-guided missiles and announced:

"Fox Two!"

He pressed the firing button. A missile was fired from under his wing and rushed towards the designated target, guided by the heat of his thruster. There was a violent explosion as the craft disintegrated and fell on the ocean in the form of burning debris.

"Wow! Splash on the bandit(enemy hit)."

The flyers still present suddenly retreated and Hasegawa smiled:

"I knew it, nothing but cowards..."

Unfortunately, cowardice had nothing to do with the withdrawal of the flyers.

The SNS sensor of Yamakawa Super-Hawk pinpoints a sudden elevation of P.P.E. around the nearest Horune's Dream Ship. A moment later, her main Storm Cannon open fire...

The Storm Cannon was more than just a "cannon"... it was a mixture of technology and magic capable of casting... spells! And now, the cannon just cast Summon Storm.

Until then, the air over the strait was still relatively calm despite the proximity of an approaching tropical storm. But the wind forced brutally while the sky was covered with clouds literally appeared by magic!

Aboard the task force's flagship, the Kaishō (Admiral) Takushimi turned to the radio officer. Ask our fighters to return to land on the Taisho, no use risking their lives in this storm!"

"At your command, Admiral!"

Admiral Takushimi approached a strange character, very different from the sailors in military fatigues or in white uniform installed in front of the bridge's consoles. He was a humanoid... but his skin and clothing seemed to be made of liquid metal. Takushimi spoke to him in American:

"Martinez, go ask your Whales Singer friends for help."

"All right, Admiral."

The man (was he a man?) ran to the exit. He went down the stairs, went out onto the deck of the ship, and - without hesitation- jumped into the water.

A few moments later, a dolphin sculpted in mercury leaped among the waves. He then began to sing...
On the bridge, the sonar's operator turned to the Kaishō Takushimi:

"Admiral, Martinez-san started singing."

Several minutes elapsed in a tense silence and then the sonar's operator jolted:

"I hear an answer... several whales respond... and they seen angry!"

The admiral smiled:

"I'm not surprised, Itto-kaisō (Chief Petty Officer). Whales don't like Horune."

Admiral Takushimi was born almost fifty years before the opening of the Rifts. Now 55 years old - which was young for Japanese technology at the end of the 21st century - he still had more difficulty adapting to the world in which he had brutally projected than the young people he commanded.

Many things continued to make him uncomfortable, Martinez for example.

It was a Dolphin Pneuma-Biform... the result of a magical experience of the Lord of the Deep, the fusion between a human and a dolphin. The result was this being endowed with two souls and able to adopt two different forms. Oddly, although created by an inhuman monstrosity like the Lord of the Deep, most Pneuma-Biforms fought their creator.

As for the Wale Singers, it was an alliance of Sea Druids, Ocean Mages, Pneuma-Bifforms fusion of humans and marine mammals as well as real dolphins and whales. The strange energies that bathed the oceans had mutated quantities of marine creatures often in horrible or strange ways. In the case of the dolphins and the whales, they had acquired almost human intelligence!

Takushimi shook his head.

Finally, regardless of whether their new allies were beings who defied pré-Rifts logic, they had common enemies and were ready to help each other. That was all that mattered.

"Helmsman, full speed ahead! To Fuyuki!"

While the officer at the helm changed the course of the Taiyo, the admiral returned to sit in his command chair.

It would take several hours to get there. He hoped that the scouts had not been mistaken and that there were many very powerful supernatural creatures in the rifted town... because it was not with weapons of the 20th century that one could stop an Horune!

These supernatural creatures were bulletproof. To hurt them, you had to use lasers, railguns, or other technologically advanced weapons... or magic, of course.

In a street of Fuyuki, Tohsaka Rin, Saber, and Emiya Shirou would run towards the bridge crossing the Mion River. Both Magi used the Reinforcement Magecraft to keep up with the Servant who, however, did not run as fast as she could.

As for Saber, she was wearing a suit of armor formed by a segmented breastplate adorned with blue lines. A wide belt tightened her waist holding a kind of "skirt" formed by metal plates. She also had metal boots and gauntlets, her left gauntlet being rather a reinforced mitten capable of serving as a targe. Underneath she was dressed with an old styled dress, made from old-fashioned blue cloth.

Her elegant face showed cold determination and concern. More than ever, Saber was the feminine embodiment of chivalrous virtues.

In the sky, the storm thundered continuously and the wind was blowing more and more strongly. Although we are still in broad daylight, the streets were plunged into darkness. The rain was pouring down, forming a dense curtain that blocked the view. The railings of the sidewalks did not evacuate the rainwater quickly enough and torrents were now moving the slopes. At times, a flash of lightning cut out the twilight, but this flash was as intense as it was fleeting, leaving the young people blinded as the darkness returned in a deafening roll of drums.

[Rin...]
Hearing Archer's mental call, the heiress of the Tohsaka turned her gaze mechanically towards Shinto, even though the high buildings were invisible behind the rain wall.

With her beautiful face as wet as her hair, she looked pathetic when she turned to Shirou not in better condition than her.

"Archer has just told me that a Horune's ship some sort of... 'whale ship' will approach the port!"

Shirou uttered a squall and accelerated his race.

Rin also stepped up to keep up with him:

"What's going on here?"

"Raiga is at the port with the other members of his group, watching the container ship that was docked."
Rin nodded, aware of the redhead's anxiety. Shirou had lost his family twice, but since the death of Kiritsugu Fujimura Taiga had become a sort of big sister, and Raiga (her grandfather) considered Shirou as his own grandson. So it was a family member who was in danger.

In the late 1970s, a former Prime Minister of Japan, Mr. Tanaka, wrote a book in which he tried to propose solutions to overcrowding and pollution in the central regions of Japan, around Osaka, Nagoya, and in the Tokyo plain.

To sum up, Tanaka proposed to combat the emigration of the inhabitants of the Kyushu and Shikoku islands by developing infrastructure that would create local jobs and slow down the concentration of industries south of Honshu.

Fuyuki, a sleepy little town in Oita Prefecture, doubled in size in thirty years when a port was being built capable of unloading container vessels, an oil terminal, a refinery, and various factories. Around the 1990s, the area of Shinto was reclaimed from a previously empty wasteland, beginning a large-scale redevelopment project funded by the local government to build a modern business district containing features like a park and shopping mall in front of the train station. The City Hall being was moved from Miyama to give it a more modern structure (2), and the maintenance of the park and shopping mall were complete.

Fuyuki's development had made the fortune of the Fujimura group.

Officially, the Fujimura Group was a real estate construction company that was joined by a manager who sold and rented houses in Fuyuki and its region. In fact, the Fujimura Group was a yakuza band. The bulk of their activity was the real estate scam and the "protection" of the local traders.

The local construction boom had been bread and butter for Fujimura Raiga. A little bit of competitor sabotage, a bit of a push to convince potential customers (why hire advertisers when you had a yakuza band at your disposal?), and a little bit of embezzlement on local government-funded projects, and Raiga had found himself at the head of a real estate empire with shares in most of the constructions resulting from the Tanaka plan.

But in his own way, the oyabun (yakuza boss) Raiga was an honorable man.

When he promised to protect it wasn't empty words.

After the strange catastrophe that had befallen his town, Fuyuki was without electricity. The refrigeration facilities had stopped as the pumps used to draw drinking water.

Luckily, the large container ship Norasia Fribourg was docked when Fuyuki had been rifted in Rifts Earth. The 27,290 kW motors could be used to generate electricity, and thus revive some of the equipment necessary for the survival of the inhabitants.

Looking out into the open, some boyzoku (motorcycle thugs, yakuza auxiliaries) watched the strange whale-like ship. The ship had appeared in the middle of the storm and was approaching the docks on the other side of the container port.

The men were worried, but not one of them thought to leave. Some shook with derisory weapons: bike chains, baseball bats, knives.

In the middle of their group was an old man.

His iron-gray hair was brushed and his face was marked with deep wrinkles. His smile was something scary. He wore a simple kimono, light green at the top, dark green at the bottom. His garment was complemented by a sleeveless jacket with a yellow and black tiger pattern.

He was leaning on a katana.

But they wouldn't be the only ones waiting for the Horunes. In a siren howl and the radiance of their flashing lights, several Toyota police cars stopped. Men in blue uniforms came out and took shelter behind their black and white painted vehicles. All had bullet-proof vests, but their weapons consisted of New Nambu M60 (3).

There was a movement of surprise when a hatch opened in the flank of the monstrous vessel, the sight of the Horunes descending to land, and that of their allies, alien or deformed mutant sea creatures, caused fear among the group of defenders.

As the pirates advanced towards them, brandishing sort of pistols and barbed swords, the police and thugs began to retreat.

But before panic drove them to flee, a shower of arrows fell upon the invaders!

At the top of Center Building, Archer made a new arrow appear. The projectile seemed made of translucent glass. It was not a weapon drawn from its Reality Marble, but an arrow made of Prana and created by a variant of the Tracing process that the hero EMIYA called Projection-Injection.

He bends his big black bow and drew the arrow to the sky. At the height of its trajectory, the projectile separated into several identical arrows, which in turn separated into other arrows... they were Self-Replicating Arrows! A method allowing a single bowman to repeat the feat of the English at the Battle of Crécy!

The corner of his lips rose briefly in a grimace:

"Damn!"
Its strength had increased, but this was not the only effect of the new universe.

His Self-Replicating Arrows were one of his weakest weapons. It would never have occurred to him to use them against a Servant. In fact, these projectiles were hardly more dangerous than ordinary arrows. He had created this technique during his long slavery in the service of Alaya. Most of the time, she sent him to clean up and destroy ordinary individuals: terrorists, Roman legionaries, jailers of the Bastille, etc... No need to do much damage, just to kill quickly. This task was already repulsive, EMIYA was not going to make it last longer than necessary.

Archer's eyes were not deceived by the rain curtains and the low clouds, he saw clearly the quays and the result of his first two volleys. And there were two things that were absolutely not normal.
First, his "ordinary" arrows had smashed the concrete, ravaging the jetty!

Second, despite the new power gained by the Self-Replicating Arrows... Archer had only killed a few opponents! The Horunes and their allies were obviously of the tough kind!

This time, Archer let show this infuriating smile that he always wore before resorting to one of the countless tricks that his Reality Marble gave him access to.

All right, if those Horunes wanted him to get serious, he wouldn't hold back.

A bluish aura suddenly appeared around him. With his eyes fixed on his target, Archer stretched out a hand and a red flame began to dance and grow in his palm.

Then the flame gave birth to a strange weapon. It was a pitch-black sword with a few small edges coiling around the thin core, spiraling around it and somewhat curving outward.

He put the weapon on his bow and bends it with all his strength... However, the sword undergoes a strange transformation, it becomes thinner and takes on the characteristics of an arrow even if its general appearance remains bewildering.

EMIYA briefly closed his eyes to concentrate and then re-opened them:

" Hrunting: Hound of the Red Plains!"

The police and thugs were still wondering where the archers who had arrested the invaders were. But suddenly, a red light appeared... a simple line that had spread so fast that it was already touching its target as humans and Horunes discovered it.

There was a sort of explosion among the Horunes and one of the fighters collapsed with his chest torn apart.

Already a second shot, then a third, a fourth, and finally a fifth fell on them.

Each time, the magic bullet enveloped in a red light took the most direct road, striking and killing an enemy. But each time, the energy released by the final explosion was more violent. Wounding and throwing down the pirates around the victim.

Hrunting's last shot hit the Horune's Dream Ship. The explosion was not enough to destroy the ship but left a shredded hole on the hull, and severely damaging her.

The survivors of the pirate commando rushed inside the ship. In their panic, they abandoned the dead and wounded behind them. The damaged Dream Ship moved away quickly. The crew was now convinced that Fuyuki was defended by a hundred archers equipped with magic arrows and helped by a powerful mage!

The first assault had been repelled. But other Horunes' ships were converging on Fuyuki. The battle was just beginning.

As for Archer, he was meditating.

Life was strange.

He had agreed to serve Alaya because he had devoted his life to saving humans. The Will of Humanity had given him the power to realize his immature, idealistic and ridiculous desire, in exchange for his eternal servitude.

He welcomed death with a smile, convinced that his death was the beginning of an eternity devoted to protecting humanity.

But the reality was that Alaya only protected humanity from threats born of humanity.

In other words, being a member of the Counterforce was being a... garbage man. EMIYA eliminated the human waste that cluttered man's history and threatened it survival.

He, who dreamed of saving humans, had been condemned to kill them again, again and again... an endless task, worthy of Sisyphus.

And today, for the first time, he had fulfilled his childhood dream.

He had acted like a true hero, protecting humans from an inhuman threat.

Of all the residents of Fuyuki, EMIYA was the only one who was happy to have arrived in this new world.

Author's note: The connoisseurs of the Fateverse must doubtless be surprised by some events of this chapter.

In the first place, no human could live in an environment saturated with magical energy like Rifts.
You would be right to say it... except that we are NO longer in the Fateverse.

The greatest peculiarity of Rifts Earth is the ability of this universe to adapt the beings that were rifted to Rifts Earth's rules.

I'm not going to get into a big explanation of it. If you are interested in understanding the why and the how, I advise you to read the Rifts conversion books series (three books: "Rifts Conversion book", "Rifts Dark Conversion", and "Pantheons of the Megaverse"). They explain what happens when an individual from one universe travels to another.

Just remember that people who find themselves rifted adapt to their news universes, it's not a magical process... errr in fact it's a magical process... but what I mean to say is people don't find themselves miraculously transformed. Magical objects are instantly transformed, as are spells, and Magical creatures (like a Servant) because the magical level is higher. Non-magical objects don't transform and effects on individuals are variables and can take several months to manifest.

(1) Gilgamesh will not appear in the next chapters. I want to reassure the fans of the King of Heroes... he's gone to take care of something important for him. What he's going to find out... let's just say even he wasn't expecting this.

(2) Until it was destroyed by Angra Mainyu at the end of the Fourth Grail War.

(3) A 38. Special revolver of Japanese designs based on those of the "J-Frame" and "K-Frame" revolvers of Smith & Wesson company. The revolver has a five-round cylinder. Yes, not really a very powerful or modern weapon. But contemporary Japan has the lowest crime rate in the world. So the police only use their weapons at the shooting range.