Day 2: Luvia — Soul-Eater

The Fuyuki serial killer had struck again.

Luvia's search spell led her to the scene of the crime. An ordinary looking house, the front door was ominously broken. The killer had been here, and recently; though, from the fact that no sounds of violence came from the house, it seemed like they had already moved on. The first step was to secure the scene: the less disturbance there was to the evidence, the more she'd be able to learn about the serial killer magus. Luvia placed down five gems in a pattern around the house, then spoke words to activate the magecraft.

"Begin instructions." Luvia said. "Establish bounded field. Isolate enclosed area. Repel intruders by method of confusion and disorientation. Access permission: magus Luviagelita Edelfelt and Lancer-class Servant Rei Ayanami. Induce sleep in entities within boundary. End condition: termination by authorized user. Instruction complete."

Such a powerful spell would normally be beyond the capacity of Luvia's magecraft. However, knowing that it might be necessary for Luvia's investigation, Lord El-Melloi II had constructed the spell and embedded it into a set of gems. Luvia had only to provide them with the necessary parameters and prana, and the pre-constructed spell would activate. It was effectively a Mystic Code: a magical artifact with a narrow, predetermined usage that could be performed regardless of its user's inherent capability in that area of magecraft. Having now set the parameters for the usage, all that was left was for her to turn it on.

"Aktivieren."

Operating on Luvia's instructions, the activated spell enveloped the house in a barrier invisible to all but spiritually sensitive beings like magi and Servants. It would allow entry or exit only to Luvia and Rei; anyone else trying to approach the house would find themselves disoriented and confused. Furthermore, any humans inside the house should have been put into a deep state of magically-endued sleep. Nobody would interfere with her investigation, save for one possibility: that the perpetrator might in fact still be present, waiting in ambush. The Fuyuki serial killer was suspected to be a magus; and depending on the extent of his ability, he might very well be capable of constructing a spell that would counter the one which was supposed to put him to sleep.

"Go in and check for danger." Luvia told her Servant.

"Understood."

The pale, blue-haired girl nodded her acknowledgment and then entered the building without hesitation. Luvia still didn't have a very strong understanding of her Servant. She'd always thought Heroic Spirits had powerful egos and were incredibly difficult to control, hence the need for Command Spells. This Lancer, however, was almost pathologically obedient and submissive. When Luvia had asked what wish she had for the Holy Grail, she'd stated that she didn't have a wish; that it was simply her purpose to serve.

Even more disconcerting were the details that Luvia had cajoled out of her about her life. The Servant had given her name as Rei Ayanami, then given a bizarre and at times incomprehensible account of her battles against beings she called "Angels". As best Luvia could understand, Rei was a homunculus specially created to battle these beings, which from her description seemed to be the entities more commonly known as the Aristoteles, the Ultimate Ones. But in so many places, Rei's account contradicted common knowledge that Luvia had been taught during her training. Everyone knew that the Ultimate One of the Moon was Crimson Moon Brunestud, who had been defeated by the great Sorcerer Kischur Zelretch Schweinorg's use of the Second True Magic. However, Rei spoke of a completely different entity called Black Progenitor Lilith, who had been kept imprisoned deep beneath the surface of the world using a larger version of the Noble Phantasm she wielded.

The Throne of Heroes, from which the souls of epic spirits were called to take form as Servants, existed outside of time. It was therefore possible to summon Servants from many different possible alternate futures. Now, for the first time, Luvia found herself wondering if it was also possible to summon Servants from alternate pasts; from parallel worlds where history had unfolded along different lines. That seemed to be the only explanation for the strange history that this Servant spoke of.

Rei returned to the doorway of the house.

"There is no danger." she reported.

Luvia followed her Servant into the house. The first thing she had to do was figure out what kind of magecraft the killer was using. The Edelfelt family used jewel magic, a method by which spells were stored in prana-infused gemstones and activated at the desired moment. While it could produce versatile effects, it relied heavily on preparing the proper spells in advance. Thus, knowing the enemy's magecraft would be key to countering and defeating him in combat. In the best case scenario, Rei would simply execute the serial killer — no magus, no matter how skilled, would be able to outfight a Servant — but Luvia couldn't count on things going so smoothly. In the worst case scenario, the enemy magus might have a Servant of his own capable of matching Rei in combat. If that was the case, Luvia wanted to be prepared to take him down in a one-on-one duel of magecraft.

The first thing Luvia took note of was the door. At first glance, she had thought that it had been blown off its hinges; but now that she was looking at it up close, she could tell that the damage was more intense than that. The entire slab of wood seemed to have been shattered, with the epicenter of the destruction in middle: nothing of the central portion remained, while there were still some large fragments of the edges and corners. Luvia considered an explosion, but there was no apparent burning or warping. Likewise, the fractures were far too fine and precise for the door to have been broken apart with magically-enhanced strength.

Based on the jigsaw-like way the door had broken into pieces, Luvia finally came to the tentative conclusion that the magecraft used was alchemy: a thaumatergical technique that converted one type of matter to another. The mage had used an alchemic reaction to break the door into small pieces. At the center of the door, where the reaction had begun, the wood had probably been reduced to its component atoms; the reaction had then lost strength as it spread out, resulting in larger and larger pieces towards the edges.

Alchemy was the signature magic of the Einzbern family, but Luvia strongly doubted that the Einzbern Master was responsible. For one thing, Einzbern Masters were hardly renowned for their combat magecraft; traditionally, they relied on either an outside contractor or the power of their Servant for dirty work. For another, the Einzbern were incredibly stuffy traditionalists. It was unthinkable that one of them would turn into a rogue serial killer and be allowed to go on a mad killing spree.

Having deduced all she could from the killer's means of entry, Luvia followed Rei deeper into the house. Rei led Luvia into the living room, where she was suddenly assaulted by the unmistakable stench of death. Two fresh corpses lay cooling on the floor amidst a puddle of blood. The backs of their skulls appeared to have exploded, spraying chunks of bone and liquified brain matter across the floor and walls.

"Ugh!" Luvia gagged. "You could have warned me!"

"There is no danger." Rei repeated tonelessly, unaffected by the gruesome sight.

Luvia fought down her nausea and forced herself to take in the scene in greater detail. One of the bodies was an adult male, the other a young boy; probably father and son. Their hair was blonde, and based on the serial killer's past method of choosing victims she assumed that their eyes had been blue — the damage inflicted to their faces made it hard to be certain.

There was a third person in the room as well: a dark-haired woman who Luvia assumed to be the man's wife, the child's mother. She was slumped in the corner clutching a telephone, which she had probably used to call the police. To Luvia's surprise, the woman was not dead; she had merely been put to sleep by the spell she'd used to enclose the house. From the fact that the killer had no longer been present when the bounded field went up, Luvia had assumed that he'd had time to finish his murderous work and move on. But if that was so, why had left behind a living woman? Even if she didn't fit his usual criteria for victim selection, she had to have seen everything that had happened. It didn't make sense to leave behind a witness.

For a moment, Luvia considered waking the woman and questioning her. However, she quickly decided that it would be more trouble than it was worth. The woman was probably traumatized from seeing her family killed in front of her; there was no telling if she'd be in any condition to speak rationally. Luvia couldn't afford the time it might take to calm her down and get her to explain things coherently: while the bounded field would prevent the police from finding the house as long as it was active, she couldn't leave it up for too long or it might result in some awkward questions getting asked. It was essential that magecraft be kept secret from ordinary people: causing a major ruckus in the Fuyuki police department over their mysterious inability to find a house that should be in plain sight was not conducive to that goal. Not to mention, if she questioned the woman, the woman would tell the police about her, too. Better to let the police handle the witness statement part of the investigation and sneak a look at the results once they were done.

Luvia turned her attention to the two corpses. Their faces were partially crushed; she could almost see the outline of a hand imprinted into their skulls. It was contact-based magecraft, then: the killer had to grasp his victim's head in his hand before he could destroy it. That was valuable combat data. But even more significantly, the sheer strength required to leave such an impression in flesh and bone suggested that the killing had been done by a Servant rather than a human magus. Trying to sense any residual mana in the bodies confirmed Luvia's suspicion: the method used to kill them had completely drained them of their life energy, their od. Magi didn't do that. But Servants were spiritual beings, and as such could consume spiritual energy.

"It's a soul-eater." Luvia said.

Servants didn't go around eating humans like the city was an all-you-can-eat buffet; it drew too much undesirable attention. For one thing, it could allow other Masters to gain knowledge regarding the Servant's location and killing technique, much as Luvia was now doing. For another, too much wanton killing would draw the attention of ordinary humans, which would in turn lead to the intervention of the Overseer of the Grail War. Generally, there were only two reasons that a Servant might resort to consuming human souls. The first was if a Master summoned a particularly sub-par Servant — he could order the Servant to increase its power by feeding on humans. The second was if a Servant lost its Master — it could consume souls to sustain its existence while searching for a new Master to form a contract with. The serial killer had been active for two months already, and it seemed unlikely that a Servant had lost its Master before the War had even begun — but what if it was an aberration like Rei, who had appeared without a Master in the first place? In that case, the serial killings had actually been a solitary Servant feeding on souls in order to survive.

Both explanations, however, failed to explain the serial killer's choice of targets. If all the Servant was after was the prana to be gained by devouring its target's soul, there should be no reason to restrict its selection of victims based on hair and eye color. The only possible explanation Luvia could conceive for that oddity was a strange psychological quirk of either the Master or Servant. For instance, the Servant's Master was a fanatic racial supremacist, and so only allowed it to feed on foreigners. Or else, the Servant would normally resist any order to kill innocents; but because of a grudge from their life, they were willing to target people with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Regardless of the motive, the fact remained that it presented Luvia with the perfect opportunity to use herself as bait. She just had to walk around the city, flaunting her features, and sooner or later the soul-eater would see her and pick a fight. Its methods didn't seem particularly subtle, so she wasn't worried about an ambush. Really, the biggest problem was that some other Master might see her as a threat and decide to eliminate her from the War. Tohsaka seemed to be showing at least a modicum of respect and holding back for now, but there was no guarantee that the other Masters would be so understanding.

On the other hand, now that she knew her target was a Servant, she had a very good justification for entering the Holy Grail War. She'd be able to tell Lord El-Melloi II that the only chance she'd had of defeating the serial-killer Servant was to contract with a Servant of her own. And if she went on to win the entire War, claim the Grail, and restore the lost honor of the Edelfelt family... well, now that was just a bonus, wasn't it?

"Abbrechen."

Luvia walked out of the house with Rei beside her, the bounded field collapsing at her command. The police cars which were circling the neighborhood in confusion would soon be able to reach their location; no doubt blame for the delay would fall on an error in whatever fancy computer navigation system they used. They would get on with their utterly futile investigation, trying in vain to comprehend the means and motive of a killer who hailed from a different era or even a different world. They would never succeed; the Holy Grail War would proceed in secrecy as it had for hundreds of years. A rogue magi was one thing, but the only one capable of stopping a Master and Servant was another Master and Servant.

Fortunately for the city, Luvia was a Master now. This rogue, murderous Servant would soon be handled — and with it, she would take the first step on her path to the Holy Grail.