"To conclude, last night there were city wide earthquakes, a sudden hurricane that dispersed the clouds across multiple provinces, the Fuyuki River has been contaminated with an unknown toxin, multiple buildings across the city, including the iconic Center Building, have been destroyed or have disappeared completely for unknown reasons, the Fuyuki Bridge collapsed, numerous civilians have reported flashes of light across the sky, many of the mountains surrounding Fuyuki have crumbled, the Riverside Park has been replaced with a wasteland, and sounds of metal clanging and explosions could be heard for kilometers. All these bizarre occurrences are yet to be explained and city officials are still investigating, but they suspect some kind of natural disaster is the cause. Much speculation on the internet has made comparisons to the Tunguska Event due to the similar inexplicability. Many are worried over how the city will recover from this and whether more of these strange events will occur tonight as well. Relief efforts are underway while many conspiracy theorists and ufologists have come to Fuyuki to do their own investigations. Not just the eyes of Japan, but of everyone in the world are on Fuyuki right now."

Kirei pinched his nose at the staggering amount of stress he was under. He shut off the television in his office and leaned back in his chair as far as he could. There was one rule more important than any other in a Holy Grail War and that was to keep the war a secret from the general populace. It couldn't have been that hard of a rule to follow considering magi kept mystics secret for their entire lives and the Holy Grail War, for all its pomp and circumstance, was just a single battle royale that occurred over a brief period.

Instead of being stealthy, the Masters and Servants of the Fifth Holy Grail War have generated the most blatant display of mystics in the modern era. The Holy Church and Mage's Association must have been deeply chagrined about this so it wouldn't take long before Kirei would start to get complaints. Certain cadres may have been planning to use this as their way to muscle into the war and confiscate the Greater Grail, so Kirei had to take immediate action.

First thing would be to send a message to all the Masters that Kirei could contact letting them know that this behavior would not be acceptable. If any Master or Servant continued making blatant displays of the supernatural, then all other Masters and Servants would be ordered to eliminate the offending faction with a Command Spell being gifted to whoever takes out the target as an incentive. It was the same tactic used to deal with Caster in the Fourth War when he became blight and while it ended poorly for Kirei's father, Kirei himself would be far more cautious when it came to handing off the Command Spell.

As an extra incentive to remain secretive, Kirei would threaten that if the war didn't become less noticeable to the general public, then the entire ritual would have to be scrapped with no Master receiving the Grail. That would scare everyone into behaving for the time being while Kirei dealt with the onrushing lividity and scheming of the Holy Church and Mage's Association. That assumed that one or more of the Master-Servant teams weren't rudderlessly doing as they pleased without interest in actually winning the war.

If only the chaos of the previous night was the only issue that had to be addressed, then perhaps Kirei would have been able to maintain a level of inner peace. One sticking point that Kirei had been keeping to himself was that there wasn't the normal number of Master-Servant teams in this Holy Grail War. Kirei knew that the Edelfelt team likely had a second Master and Servant given they did the same thing in the Third War, but that wasn't what Kirei was concerned about. There was another faction entirely. Eight individuals reported to Kirei that they were Masters who had summoned Servants. There was an invader in this war and they either had the audacity to not try and keep their existence secret, or they didn't even realize they weren't supposed to be participating. The obvious way of narrowing down suspects would have been to see which two Masters had summoned Servants of the same class, but not all the Masters had reported the class of the Servants they summoned.

Rin summoned Saber, Bazett summoned Lancer, Chloe summoned Archer, and Luviagelita Edelfelt summoned Caster while her sister likely summoned a second Caster. None of the other Masters actually said which Servant they summoned and Kirei never felt the need to insist. A foolish error in hindsight. That said, it was also possible that the false Master's Servant was summoned as one of the Extra Classes instead of the standard Knight or Cavalry classes so this method of deduction wasn't foolproof anyway.

But there was more than one way to skin a cat and there was more than one way to find an invader. The simplest way was to use Occam's Razor and assume that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. It was likely that whoever was intruding upon the war was also the one that was taking other suspicious actions. It wasn't a definite method of deduction but it was the best lead Kirei had at the moment.

The most suspicious party who were likely the invaders were the Einzbern group with Illyasviel as the Master. They were already the ones claiming that the Grail was corrupted with no clear evidence and stated they wanted to know its location to dismantle it. They may have barged into the Holy Grail War to try and steal the Grail, though Illyasviel did possess genuine Command Spell which corroborated their legitimacy. They may have simply 'hacked' into the Grail somehow using their knowledge as former members of the Einzbern family to grant themselves Command Spells. Command Spells were the specialty of the Matous, not the Einzberns though. They might have also acquired unused Command Spells from previous Holy Grail Wars that previous overseers failed to reacquire. The Command Spells that Kiritsugu Emiya possessed in the Fourth War were never recovered so they could have been using those.

Researching to see if Illyasviel and Irisviel had any validity behind their claims hadn't borne much fruit. There's nothing that clearly proved the Grail was corrupted and the only time anything strange happened with the previous Grail Wars on record was that an Avenger class Servant was summoned instead of a Berserker during the Third Holy Grail War. That doesn't mean much other than there is evidence that the Grail can be manipulated which bolsters the idea that one Master forced their way into the war since Avenger was summoned by altering the Servant summoning ritual. The fact that the one who summoned Avenger in the Third War was the Einzbern Master only put more suspicion on Illyasviel and her mother.

This didn't mean there was any hard proof that the former Einzberns were doing anything nefarious. It did necessitate an investigation along with the continued investigation into the Grail's history and if it could really have been polluted.

As the coup de grâce to the sea of stress Kirei was under, Rin had been kidnapped and Sakura was in the hospital. The worst part was that Kirei couldn't do anything to help unless he wanted to risk his position as overseer which was already tenuous thanks to the madness of last night. Christ, Rin and Sakura didn't even last a day before they screwed up. Rin was as accident prone as…well…Rin.

As Kirei avoided finding pleasure in imagining the pain Sakura was in or Rin being tortured by an enemy Master, he pondered whether or not there was anything he could do to help Rin and Sakura with their current plight without breaking his oath to be impartial as an overseer. The priest wanted to do the right thing, but the rub was that it was unclear what the right thing was in such a complicated scenario. Kirei always tried to do what was good and not evil, which had the difficulty of being based on a binary view of human behavior. His methodology revolved around doing whatever was the right thing to do and right now what was right wasn't clear since Kirei had a duty to both his adoptive children to keep them safe and to preserve the rules of the Holy Grail war which multiple Masters were risking their lives to participate in. This situation was morally gray and so the simplistic philosophy that the priest defined himself with was insufficient. The way Kirei typically decided what actions were good and which were evil when he struggled was by thinking about which option in a situation brought him more joy. Since he was made happy by the depraved alone, the option that made him feel better was the wrong choice. Using his typical metric, the wrong choice would be to not help Rin and Sakura since that meant they would potentially suffer which would make him happy. Kirei knew that such a method of determining morality didn't really fit the current situation, because if the laws of the Holy Grail War were ignored without getting punished, the ritual could descend into chaos and innocents could perish in the crossfire. Kirei was at a loss.

All of this philosophizing was flawed in its premise. Kirei had an epiphany when he thought about how mechanical he was in trying to determine right and wrong. He was trying to use a preset list of rules which wasn't how humans really acted, only governments and systems of law. Humans were inconsistent and hypocritical and often acted on impulse or out of spite or passion. Kirei needed to live a virtuous life, but true pragmatic morality was for angels. He needed to be ethical in the human sense of the word and that meant being a hypocrite; forsaking the wellbeing of some for the sake of others who were personally favored.

Kirei was a foster father to Rin and Sakura and a father had to do all they could to protect their children. Could anyone blame Kirei for trying to help his daughters survive? Even God couldn't have been so judgemental.

Kirei stood from his seat as he steeled his resolve to help his daughters. Now he just had to think of how he could without alerting the other Masters to his bias, since he was certainly being watched by familiars at all times. He was safe from sight within the Bounded Field of the church, but he wouldn't be able to act feely outside without getting noticed. At the very least Kirei could call Sakura and tell her everything he knew about the other Masters and Servants. Information was power in a Holy Grail War and though he knew little about the Assassin team, he knew the identity of Assassin's Master which would be helpful.

He could try giving Sakura Command Spells using Caren as an intermediary, but that would still require Caren entering the church to retrieve the Command Spells and she'd likely get tailed afterward by Masters who were on the suspicious side. He could do a secret hand off of the Command Spells in public actually if he isolated the Command Spells from himself which he knew how to do. He could make a Book of False Attendant to safely seal the spells so he can covertly leave them somewhere in public and have Caren pick them up. Kirei was able to create such a tome thanks to having studied the magecraft of the Matous after their dissolution. Though the Matou family had devolved over the years into scum, their magecraft could find good use someday so Kirei decided to learn as much of it as he could to preserve it. Just one Command Spell would be enough for Sakura to heal herself back up to top condition since they had so much magical energy packed into them. She could use the rest to act as Saber's Master in place of Rin and strengthen the Servant when necessary since Saber wasn't at full capacity from what Kirei had heard.

The last gift that Kirei could give Sakura would be the location of the Greater Grail just in case it became necessary to get to the Grail. She could even try visiting it to confirm whether it was corrupted or not. Since Kirei was going to physically give Sakura a Book of False Attendant, he should write down the information he was going to relay and encode it so Sakura could have it on hand. She wasn't in a good mental state currently so she might not have been able to remember everything if Kirei relayed the information verbally.

If felt like so little, like there had to be more that Kirei could do to help. There wasn't in actuality, because he was still burdened with the position of overseer and if he got caught being impartial then that would paint a target on his back as well as on Rin's, Sakura's, and even Caren's. He was already taking a risk in helping his daughters at all so he should have been satisfied with the small bits of assistance he could give.

The phone on Kirei's desk made soft sounds as he picked up the receiver and tapped the buttons to call Caren. It was getting late so she had likely returned to the Hyatt to relax after spending all day with Sakura.

"Hello?" A quick response, unusually prompt since Caren usually let the phone ring for a while to annoy the caller.

"It's me. I need to ask another favor of you."

"No."

"I'll let you say cruel things to me."

"I'm cruel to you with or without your permission."

"Listen, this is something really important and it's best that we do this quickly. I need you to give Sakura some things that I can't give her myself."

"Such as?"

"Things to help her rescue Rin and win the war."

"My my. The ever moral and impartial father of mine has become a selfish sinner like the rest of us. What led to this change of heart? Did you finally reach that stick you had shoved a mile up your ass and pulled it out or perhaps it fell out while you were in the bathroom."

"Enough with the vulgar parlance, young lady. I have my reasons for acting as I am at the moment and they are complex and potentially fleeting so I need your help right now. I need you to come to the tea shop in Verde. I'm going to secretly leave a package there and I need you to come pick it up and bring it to Sakura. It should contain two books. One will contain a lot of sensitive information that I'll have encoded and the other will house Command Spells."

"You're giving Sakura that much help?"

"Rin is in danger and Sakura is seriously injured." Kirei cupped his forehead. "I need to help them."

"You're sounding like an actual human for once and it's weird. Did the Tinman get a heart from Oz?"

"Just head to Verde, please."

"I can't, I'm hanging out with a friend tonight."

"Cancel a-wait, what?" Kirei just heard the impossible. The receiver in his hand almost slipped out of his grasp as his body nearly folded from the astronomical astonishment of Caren's absurd statement.

"Please don't make jokes right now."

"What do you mean?"

"You just said you were going to spend time with a friend."

"I did."

"You said that."

"Yes."

"That statement implies you have a friend."

"It does."

"You don't have friends. You tolerate other people at best, you're not the type to make friends and you would certainly not call them such if you had them."

"That's the sticking point, yes, that makes sense. I made a friend while staying here at the Hyatt who I relate to. We have similar interests."

"In cooking? Martial arts?"

"In enjoying the suffering of others. To be fair, she enjoys seeing people flustered or upset while I prefer utter turmoil and misfortune, but we're still rather close in wavelength."

"Of course." On the one hand, this friend was not a good influence on Caren if they also possessed a thirst for pain in other people, but this was also the first friend Caren's ever made and could help her learn to relate to others. "These constant surprises are bad for my heart."

"Good."

Kirei groaned. "Who is this friend of yours by the way? Are they a boy or a girl?"

"They're a girl named Reiko. They're here on vacation from another part of Japan with their brother." Not a Master or anything. Good. She was from outside Fuyuki so they still could have been related to the war so it was best to be cautious.

"Be careful around this Reiko girl, she might be related to one of the Masters or could even be a Servant in disguise."

"She's normal, trust me."

"Just be careful."

"I will." Kirei could practically hear Caren roll her eyes.

"Back to the salient point, I still need you to head to Verde for me."

"Can't we do it tomorrow?"

"It's almost night, Servants are going to be coming out again and there's always the chance Sakura could get attacked. I want her to at least have the extra Command Spells."

Caren went quiet for a moment.

"Caren?"

"I'll do it, just stop pestering me."

"That was quick. You usually put up more of a fight."

"I'm not in the mood for an argument. I'll go to Verde and pick up the books and I'll give them to Sakura. I should be able to get it done before I was planning to go visit Reiko so it shouldn't be too much of a hassle."

"You'd still fight me on this out of principle normally so there's some other reason you're being so compliant, well, relatively compliant." Caren's turn to amiability was sudden and it occurred right when Kirei brought up the danger Sakura would be in. Was Caren actually worried about Sakura and Rin and she just didn't want to admit it. Perhaps she already possessed the ability to empathize with others and she just didn't display it normally. Kirei considered asking Caren about his theory, but she would staunchly deny it no matter whether it was accurate or not. She'd also tell Kirei to quit gibbering and put his lips to good use by kissing an oncoming train. "It doesn't matter. Thank you for being so helpful, I'll make sure to reward you for this somehow."

"You better. Anyway, I'm heading to Verde now so get going so I don't have to wait forever to pick up your books."

"I will. Be safe."

Caren didn't reply as she hung up.

And thus Kirei had more things to occupy his mind with, because he was destined to live with stress weighing upon him like armor made of lead. At least he could take solace in Caren appearing to have made the smallest modicum of progress towards becoming a more decent and healthy minded human being.

Hope that things may have started to take a turn for the better filled Kirei's heart.