"Pleasure? You call it pleasure?"
Rin glared fiercely at Kirei Kotomine, so intensely that blood vessels burst in her eyes.
"Is that really why you committed all these atrocities?! Simply for your own sick pleasure?"
"You call it atrocity? Hmm… well, from your perspective, I suppose I am the cause of everything."
Kirei stood there at ease.
Though sweat poured from his body like rain, not even a tremor disturbed him. He simply looked down at Rin with that ever-unchanging smile.
"Think back. It was ten years ago. I heard then that the Einzberns had hired a famed magus killer named Kiritsugu Emiya to be their Master for the Fourth Holy Grail War. I was quite looking forward to it. But when the war began, it wasn't Kiritsugu I found waiting. No, it was an artificial homunculus from the Einzbern house. And rather than use the homunculus as a front while lurking in the shadows, Kiritsugu vanished from the war entirely."
"I was… deeply bored by this turn of events. So, I had a little chat with Archer. Ah yes, that Archer—the golden Heroic Spirit now standing outside. At the time, he was your father's Servant."
Rin bit down hard on her lip.
Hatred burned in her eyes as she glared daggers at Kirei, so fierce her lips bled without her noticing—every inch of her desperate to tear him limb from limb.
"Seems you already know. That's right—it was I who killed your father."
As he gazed upon her hatred-twisted expression, the saintly smile on Kirei's face began to distort into something cruel.
"What the King of Heroes said back then made perfect sense to me. I wasn't so much deceived by his words as I was… drawn to them, then consumed by them. Not just my mentor… but even my own father, Risei Kotomine—I killed them both by my own hand. That expression on his face in his final moments… I'll remember it, like scripture, for the rest of my life."
By the time his words reached their end, the hatred on Rin's face had shifted into something else entirely.
Betraying a teacher could still be chalked up to self-interest.
But to slaughter one's own father with their own hands—that went beyond the scope of mere depravity. He was no longer within the realm of a normal human being. This was the kind of lunacy one saw in magi who spent too many years lost in their arcane obsessions.
This man's mind is completely broken.
"The day the Holy Grail War ended… that was when I touched the Grail. The darkness within my heart was laid bare, stripped down to nothing. And in its place… well, we all know what happened ten years ago."
As if savoring the memory, Kirei closed his eyes and raised his arms high, as though cradling a newborn.
His face radiated blissful satisfaction.
"You bastard!"
Rin spat out a curse.
"Heh… you're not wrong. Even I think so myself."
Kirei let out a small laugh, acknowledging her fury with eerie calm.
He dropped all pretense now, his face openly alight with a perverse joy.
"That disaster ten years ago… in the end, it was a perfect victory for the Greater Grail. Not even I expected it to go so smoothly. It's proof this world's already broken, isn't it? Honestly, I'd love to try it again."
"You're not saying—"
A look of horror dawned on Rin's face.
She didn't know what exactly came to mind, but she was clearly gripped by a terrible fear.
"Of course I am. I've already made my second wish upon the Greater Grail."
Kirei spread his arms wide, exhaling a sigh of false pity.
"Such a shame, Rin. If you'd only arrived a little earlier, perhaps you could've stopped me. But now… it's too late. The Greater Grail has already begun its work again. The thing inside it… it's about to be born."
He reveled in this moment.
Even he admitted he was twisted. In the first thirty years of his life, he'd done enough good deeds that he might have been sainted after death, or at least found a place in heaven.
But the sins he committed in the following decade erased it all, so foul that even being hurled into a demon's cauldron for eternal torment wouldn't suffice.
Patricide. Betraying his master. Becoming the trigger for a catastrophe through the Greater Grail, leading to the death of over ninety percent of humanity.
And beyond that—the petty cruelties, using children as batteries, handing Command Spells to Uemon Ji just to watch him hunt Roy for sport—mere trivialities compared to the rest.
"How many sins have you committed?!"
"At this point…"
He gave a crooked grin.
"Who could even keep count?"
"Archer! Kill him!"
Rin could take no more.
If he had made his wish, that meant the Greater Grail had activated again.
The endless curse of black mud. The taint that would flood the world. The inferno to incinerate mankind—it would all begin again.
Rin's rage surged to its peak.
The disaster ten years ago, born of the Greater Grail—as one of the Three Founding Families, Rin had always carried guilt for it, a burden she couldn't lay down.
And now that very nightmare was about to repeat itself.
She would never allow it.
"Even if it costs me my life, I'll stop this Greater Grail once and for all!"
With that vow in her heart, Rin refused to listen to another word from Kirei and gave the decisive order.
At her command, Archer appeared silently at her side.
Without hesitation, he nocked an arrow and loosed it at Kirei.
This arrow held nothing back—it split the air, releasing a thunderous roar, far beyond the capacity of human reflexes to evade.
Boom!
And yet.
Something inhuman appeared in the space before Kirei.
A giant hand, forged of writhing, oozing black mud.
The hand manifested out of thin air, intercepting the arrow. The arrowhead embedded itself in the mud-like flesh, unable to pierce through.
Archer's expression hardened.
He detonated the arrow without a moment's delay.
Rumble!
With a resounding blast, the arrow exploded inside the massive hand, scattering black sludge in every direction.
"It's useless."
Kirei gave a cold, amused hum.
In an instant—
More of those colossal black hands extended from the mouth of the volcano behind him, swaying like willows in the air.
Each hand, more than ten meters long, could crush a person in an instant, radiating an oppressive miasma of curses.
There were seven, no—eight in total!
"Unlike last time, when it was barely formed… this time, the vessel has long since matured. It's ready. And these… are your opponents now."
Kirei spread his arms, like a priest celebrating the birth of a dark messiah.
And then it appeared.
A giant, its entire body of pitch-black mud, rising from the volcano's mouth. Two of those eight hands were its own, the rest still writhing around it.
Its form stretched nearly thirty meters high, reaching the very ceiling of the cavernous hollow.
Rin readied her gemstones, steeling herself.
She no longer dared show the slightest carelessness.
But what came next struck her dumb.
A second giant rose from the pit.
Then a third.
Then a fourth.
Four colossal black-mud giants in total.
One after another, they marched forward from the volcano's mouth — straight toward her.
***
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