Few minutes later, after Irisviel informed Kiritsugu of their encounter with a Servant:
A few minutes had passed since the radio transmission ended. Saber and Irisviel had just delivered their report regarding their bizarre encounter with an unknown Servant.
The smoke from Kiritsugu's cigarette curled upward, hitting the low ceiling of the cheap hotel room before dissipating into a thin, hazy grey line.
Emiya Kiritsugu sat on the edge of the mattress, the heavy, metallic frame of the customized Walther WA2000 resting on the wrinkled sheets beside him.
He took another slow drag, the embers burning a bright, angry orange in the dim light of the room. His cold, dead eyes were fixed on the small radio transceiver sitting on the desk, though the device had fallen silent minutes ago.
What were the chances? he thought. What were the chances of running straight into an enemy Servant, out in the open, in the middle of a crowded city no less? Most Masters and Servants would be heavily focused on intelligence gathering, securing a defensible base, and setting up bounded fields.
But for this pair to be wandering around like there was no war going on, acting as if they didn't have a single care in the world... it made no tactical sense. He took another drag of his cigarette, his mind racing.
Maiya stood quietly by the window, expertly adjusting the straps on her tactical vest. She didn't speak. She knew Kiritsugu well enough by now to recognize when he was piecing together a puzzle, and she knew better than to interrupt his process.
"A Servant with white hair... wearing a blindfold," Kiritsugu finally muttered, his voice dry and raspy from the smoke. "No visible weapons... which obviously could just mean they are hidden. And from what I gathered from Saber's report, he traveled the distance of two pedestrian sidewalks in an absolute instant. Not even Saber as a heroic spirit was able to keep an eye on him or follow his speed... if it was purely speed at all, that is."
Maiya glanced over her shoulder. "A high-speed movement skill? Time acceleration? A special class skill? Perhaps a Noble Phantasm based purely on speed? Could it have been an illusion?"
Kiritsugu narrowed his eyes. "Quite possibly. But I think Saber would have been able to tell if it was an illusion, or at least suspect something was wrong with the space. According to Irisviel, Saber didn't even notice a massive fluctuation of mana being used for the movement. He just... appeared."
Kiritsugu exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. "He chatted. Laughed. Then offered to get a meal together. Either he is some sort of airhead Servant who fundamentally doesn't understand what a holy grail is, or worse... he is so absolutely confident in his own strength that he is directly saying: 'You can do whatever you want, and you still cannot kill me.'"
Given the unpredictable and overpowered nature of the Heroic Spirits summoned to this war, Kiritsugu always assumed the worst. It was the only way to ensure his own victory. He could not afford to let a single miscalculation come back to bite him later.
"Maiya," Kiritsugu ordered, his tone shifting into pure business. "Get on with identifying the Master. A little kid, a girl, no more than five or six years old with purple hair. There could be another one behind all of this. I don't think a child is capable of providing a stable stream of mana to a Servant… to use his strength or maintain his materialization. So it is possible someone else is doing that, or there is some other way."
"Understood," Maiya replied evenly.
Kiritsugu closed his eyes. For a fraction of a second, the image of a different little girl, one with pure white hair and bright crimson eyes, flashed behind his eyelids. Ilya. His daughter. The little girl he had hugged in the snow, the one he had left behind in that massive, castle.
He exhaled a long, shaky breath, brutally forcing the image of Ilya out of his mind. He locked away the sharp, twisting pain in his chest, burying it deep beneath the cold, calculated exterior of the Magus Killer.
He could not afford pity in this war. He could not afford hesitation just because the opposing party was a child... or even if she had somehow become a Master by mistake or some cruel twist of fate.
It would be better if this child and her Servant were taken care of early on by some other Master. It would save him the trouble. Because if they survived to the end, and if that little girl stood in his way... she was an enemy. And he would put a bullet in her head if necessary.
"Will the child's age alter the engagement parameters or change anything in our current plan if she were to be the main one?" Maiya asked, her voice devoid of judgment.
"No," Kiritsugu replied, ruthlessly crushing the cigarette butt into the glass ashtray until the embers died. He looked up, his eyes entirely void of light. "A Master is a Master. If she has Command Seals, and she stands in our way... she is, by all means, a target."
He stood up, slinging the strap of his rifle over his shoulder.
"And lastly, Maiya, please keep me informed on the matter of the Matou family's destroyed estate... or more accurately, their erased estate. I need to know who did it, if you can find out. Having a Servant die at the exact same time the estate was wiped off the map strongly implies that another Servant attacked them. It means one of the Matous was a Master, and the enemy killed the Master and destroyed the whole estate with them. Any extra info, like which Servant did it, and what kind of weapon or Noble Phantasm was used, would be highly useful."
Maiya nodded sharply. "Understood."
…
Xx:Xx hours ago:
Deep Underground Workshop. Within the bounded fields of the Tohsaka family estate.
Tohsaka Tokiomi stood perfectly still in front of his heavy mahogany desk. His posture was, as always, impeccably straight. His sharp red suit was completely devoid of a single wrinkle, radiating absolute aristocratic authority.
Yet, the grip he maintained on the silver handle of his cane was so violently tight that the veins and tendons on the back of his hand were bulging against his skin.
On the desk, the jewel communicator had just ceased its sympathetic vibrations.
The voice of Kotomine Risei, the supposedly impartial supervisor of the Holy Grail War from the Church, had just delivered a report that had completely shattered Tokiomi's elegant composure.
The report didn't necessarily ruin Tokiomi's grand stratagem, as the thing or report in question was never a major factor in his immediate plans to begin with. But the sheer scale of the news was staggering.
One of the three great founding families... the Matou family estate, had been fully erased.
And it wasn't just one of the many minor manors or safehouses the three families kept hidden around the country. It was the main estate. The ancestral home in the Miyama district where the head of the family, Zouken Matou, resided.
It wasn't damaged. It hadn't burned down. It wasn't collapsed into rubble.
It was simply gone. Erased from there.
According to the familiars dispatched by the Church to investigate a sudden, massive fluctuation of magical energy, the ancestral home of the Matou had ceased to be. There was no fire to put out. There was no debris to clear. There were no bodies to recover.
The land had been completely, perfectly hollowed out. The mansion, the underground storages, the bounded fields, all of it vanished without leaving a single trace of matter behind.
"This is... just... I do not know what to say," Tokiomi whispered into the silent room.
Zouken Matou. The ancient, rotting monster of a magus who had lived for centuries. The man who had layered centuries' worth of defensive magecraft and impenetrable bounded fields over the Matou territory. Erased in an instant.
It was safe to assume that the Matou family simply did not exist anymore. With Zouken and his som that would have been there was gone, the lineage was essentially dead, perhaps, technically, his estranged son Kariya was alive somewhere, provided he hadn't been in the estate, but the foundation of their power was ashes.
Tokiomi closed his eyes, his brilliant mind racing to calculate the shifting variables. The Holy Grail War had barely even started, and already, one of the three founding families was utterly annihilated.
And then, another thought pierced through his rigid, calculated composure.
Sakura.
He had given his second daughter to Zouken to ensure her immense magical potential wouldn't go to waste. It was a logical, necessary decision. He had done it not as a father, but as a true Magus.
He had known what would happen to her in that dark, rotting house.
He knew the training would be incredibly harsh or even unbearable. But it was all for the glory of reaching the Root, for the continuation of the bloodline, and for the honor of the craft.
But if the entire main estate was erased... then Sakura was gone too.
A brief, sharp pang, a fleeting symptom of something strongly resembling genuine grief, flared deep inside Tokiomi's chest. He had been a father, after all.
But in the very next heartbeat, he ruthlessly crushed that emotion.
To mourn her now would be an absolute insult to his big pride as a Magus. She had been given away.
Her fate had belonged entirely to the Matou family.
And if the Matou family had been destroyed by their own incompetence, or by a superior enemy, or by some Servant... then it simply meant they were weak.
The weak perish. That was the absolute rule of the Magus world.
Tokiomi opened his eyes, refocusing entirely on the tactical side of the disaster.
Who, or what, could have done this?
The only thing that made logical sense was that it was the work of a Servant possessing an Anti-Fortress Noble Phantasm, packing enough firepower to completely disintegrate matter rather than just break it.
But why would a Servant attack the Matou family so early? The answer was simple, given enough deduction. Because there was another Servant there. Two Servants must have fought... and as a result, one won, and the other died, taking the estate with them. Which meant one of the Matous had managed to become a Master and even died.
And who was the one who attacked. Possibly a Servant with a Reality Marble Noble Phantasm possibly, Tokiomi theorized, rubbing his temples.
He let out a long, composed sigh. He straightened his tie, releasing his white-knuckled grip on his cane.
"Always keep your elegance," Tokiomi reminded himself, his voice perfectly steady once again.
…
A/N: Four More Coming….