His shift the next day was again in the afternoon, but Akira left an hour early to find an internet cafe near Akihabara.
In Japan in 1999, the manga cafes that would later become a fixture of city life hadn't emerged yet. The concept that existed was something closer to a coffee shop that happened to offer internet access.
The minimum entry cost was three hundred yen for a cup of coffee, which bought thirty minutes of connection time. Staying longer meant paying more. It was not cheap by any measure, and Akira would not have spent the money at all if he hadn't needed to confirm something specific.
As it turned out, the money was well spent.
"It really doesn't exist."
He looked at the blank search results on the screen and exhaled. It wasn't a particularly emotional moment. He had simply resolved a question that had been sitting at the back of his mind since the night before.
After the idea of adapting Fate/stay night had taken hold, a second question had followed almost immediately. Did Nasu Kinoko and Takeuchi Takashi exist in this world?
In the timeline he remembered, 1998 had seen the two of them form the doujin circle Takehokki and begin serializing The Garden of Sinners on a personal website.
But this was a parallel world, different from his own in ways both small and significant. A search for either name returned nothing. Either they didn't exist here, or they hadn't yet begun creating anything that had reached the internet.
In either case, it changed nothing about his plans.
With time still remaining on his session, he let himself browse without any particular purpose.
The dominant portal on the Japanese internet at this point was Yahoo! Japan. The front page was dense with text links, organized into sections covering search, news and weather, finance and markets, entertainment and community, and a collection of free services.
It was a very specific kind of screen, full of the texture of its era in a way that was difficult to describe to someone who hadn't lived through it.
The content available online was sparse compared to what he was used to. But that sparseness had its own appeal.
He found himself clicking into a chat room and simply watching the conversation move, reading the exchanges of people who had no idea how different the internet would look in twenty years, and feeling something surprisingly close to peace.
The current online environment was simpler and more honest than what he remembered from later. The particular strain of chaos and hostility that had come to define online spaces in the future hadn't developed yet. It was quieter here, and he found that he liked it.
When the staff member came over to let him know his time was nearly up, he stood and left with a mild reluctance, collected himself, and headed toward the bookstore to begin his shift.
First thing he was buying once he had money: a computer of his own.
He added it to the list.
...
The assistant manager and the other part-time staff were people Akira had inherited no particular familiarity with from the original owner's memories. Beyond Sakamoto Kayo, the relationships were polite and functional and not much more.
So when the afternoon rush passed and the shop settled into its quieter evening rhythm, he let his thoughts return to the question he had been working through since the night before.
The original Fate/stay night game did not exist in this world. That was now confirmed. Which meant there was no source material anyone could compare his work against, no original to be faithful or unfaithful to. He could take the story in any direction he chose without anyone having grounds to object.
The laziest approach would be to do what the 2014 ufotable production had done: select the Unlimited Blade Works route, adapt it faithfully, and leave the other two routes untouched. The UBW story fit the tone of Shonen Jump reasonably well, and it was a clean, self-contained arc.
But that felt like leaving too much on the table. The other two routes had real merit, and simply discarding them sat uneasily with him.
What he was actually trying to work out was how to handle all three routes in a way that maximized the overall quality and commercial potential of the adaptation without the structure collapsing under its own weight.
The three routes of Fate/stay night were parallel storylines running alongside each other rather than sequentially. Nasu Kinoko had been explicit on this point: all three endings were valid true endings. They were not contradictory so much as they were three separate answers to different questions.
The Fate route, with Artoria as its central heroine, functioned as a relatively straightforward Holy Grail War story. It established the rules of the world, introduced the key players, and laid out the foundational values of the narrative.
The emotional core was the shared idealism between Emiya Shirou and Artoria, the way each recognized something of themselves in the other, and the mutual redemption that followed from that recognition. Artoria made peace with her past. Shirou emerged with his convictions deepened rather than shaken.
The Unlimited Blade Works route brought Tohsaka Rin to the center and introduced Archer, a future version of Shirou who had followed the ideal of becoming a hero of justice to its logical and despairing conclusion.
The route used that confrontation to interrogate the ideal itself, forcing Shirou to look directly at what he might become and decide whether he wanted it anyway. He did. The contradiction didn't break him. And Rin's presence opened the possibility of a future different from the one Archer represented, a path forward that hadn't existed before she entered the picture.
The Heaven's Feel route broke from the tone of the first two entirely. It moved into darker territory, exposing the hidden truths behind the Holy Grail War and placing Shirou in a situation where his ideals and his love for Matou Sakura were irreconcilable.
He chose Sakura. He abandoned his principles, made enemies of the world, and declared openly that he would be an ally only for her. The route explored what it meant to choose one person over everything else, and it did not flinch from the cost of that choice.
The three routes were thematically distinct enough that merging all of their content into a single unified story without losing what made each one work was not a realistic proposition.
However, the Fate route and the Unlimited Blade Works route shared enough common ground that integration was not impossible. With careful adaptation and some pruning, a version that drew from both felt achievable.
Heaven's Feel was the problem.
Its themes and story diverged too sharply from the first two routes to integrate without extensive restructuring, and even then the result would likely be something that satisfied no one fully.
But beyond the structural difficulty, the route had deeper problems that had bothered him for years.
Heaven's Feel carried too much content that hadn't originally belonged to it. The most obvious example was the section where the hidden truth of the Holy Grail War was finally revealed.
That material had clearly been intended for a separate Illyasviel route, which had been cut from the final game. When that route disappeared, its most critical plot content was folded into Heaven's Feel instead, crowding out space that should have been devoted to developing the route's actual heroine, Matou Sakura, among others.
And the cuts hadn't stopped with Illya's route. Years of fan discussion had identified the likely ghosts of several other routes that hadn't survived into the finished game.
A Caster route, apparently, where she might have been encountered on the very first day walking home from school. A Rider route branching off from Heaven's Feel.
Even a Matou Shinji route that would have excavated the history of the Matou family directly. Whatever those routes might have added to the overall picture, they were gone, and the gaps they left behind showed.
The Matou Shinji question led naturally to one of his longest-standing objections to Nasu Kinoko's writing, and one of the primary reasons he had spent years as a critical voice within the fanbase rather than a straightforward enthusiast.
Nasu Kinoko had a pattern. When he wanted to depict a female character enduring suffering or oppression, his instinct was to reach for sexual violence as the vehicle for that suffering, with a consistency that went well beyond any individual creative decision.
Matou Sakura was the most prominent example, but she was far from alone. Caren Ortensia in the Fate series. Kohaku in Tsukihime. Asagami Fujino in The Garden of Sinners. The list went on.
If it had been one character, or two, there might have been room to discuss the narrative function of those choices. With this many characters receiving the same treatment across this many works, the only reasonable conclusion was that it reflected a personal preference on the author's part rather than any considered artistic decision.
It was not a writing approach he had any respect for, and the damage it did to those characters was real and measurable.
Matou Sakura's popularity had always sat notably below that of Artoria and Tohsaka Rin. There were multiple reasons for that gap, and the route's structural problems were certainly among them.
But her experiences within that route were also an undeniable factor. The way a character was treated on the page shaped how readers felt about them. It was not a complicated equation.
None of that was going to appear in his version.
In the days that followed, Akira spent most of his mental energy working through the adaptation problem from every angle.
Integrating the routes was the central challenge, but it wasn't the only one. Individual characters needed attention as well. The most obvious case was Gilgamesh.
In the original game, Gilgamesh functioned as a straightforward villain: immensely powerful, contemptuous of everything and everyone beneath him, motivated by a desire for destruction and domination. As a character design it was thin. He worked as an obstacle, as a source of threat, but not as much more than that.
What had happened to Gilgamesh in the years after Fate/stay night was a different story. Nasu Kinoko had developed a clear personal attachment to the character and had used his subsequent appearances across the franchise to steadily deepen and complicate him, building out a coherent inner logic that made sense of his attitudes and behavior in ways the original game hadn't bothered to provide.
By the time that process was finished, Gilgamesh had become a genuinely complex figure with a complete personality, capable of carrying any scene he appeared in.
The problem was that no amount of later supplementary material could erase what the original game had established.
His early appearances remained what they were, and the gap between that version and the later developed one had created a lasting tension in how fans related to the character.
There were people who had first encountered the fully realized Gilgamesh through later works and then gone back to Fate/stay night to find someone unrecognizable.
And there were people who had formed their opinion of him entirely from the original game and found the later attempts at rehabilitation unconvincing.
He had no interest in recreating that problem. If he was adapting Fate/stay night, Gilgamesh would be written from the beginning with the benefit of everything that later material had established about him.
His behavior in the story would have a coherent foundation. He would be a complete character from his first appearance rather than a flat one who got retroactively complicated.
The same principle applied to every character or plot point in a similar situation.
As he kept organizing his thoughts, one idea connecting to the next, the shape of the adaptation began to clarify.
Alongside the structural planning, he had also started drawing every day. This wasn't about maintaining skill level. It was about something more specific, something that would determine whether the finished work looked the way it needed to look.
Takeuchi Takashi's art style.