The wind cut across his face like a blade, but EMIYA barely felt it.
He ran swift and silent through the forest, each step measured, each breath even. The weight on his back shifted slightly—Isshiki clinging tighter as the terrain grew rougher—but it didn't throw him off. He adjusted without thinking.
Ralts was secured to his front, strange and soft and utterly absurd, she was clearly wary of whatever she felt coming from the town, tensing even more as they approached. Yet she hadn't panicked once. A rare quality. He respected it.
The trees began to thin and the air shifted. And then, when they crossed the threshold, everything changed. The darkness wasn't just an absence of light. It felt deliberate. A swallowed hush. No streetlights. No glow from windows. Power lines sagged like broken ribs over the skeletal town. Houses loomed like tombstones.
Then came the screams.
Faint. Muffled. Distant, but unmistakable. He could distinguish at least two women, one child, and someone gargling through blood. The spacing between them told him there had been more earlier. Most had already fallen silent.
He slowed to a halt at the edge of a frost-covered ridge overlooking the town's outer limits.
Carefully, he knelt.
Isshiki slid off his back with a soft grunt, boots crunching against the snow. Ralts hopped down beside him, her previous happy face pinched now in worry. The chef was shaking—trying to hide it, but EMIYA could feel it in the way he'd gripped him during the ride.
He was clearly not built for this, he thought. And yet, he didn't run.
EMIYA scanned the town. His eyes picked out heat signatures, movement, flickers of unnatural shadows cast by firelight somewhere inside the blackout zone.
"I hear at least four active zones," he said, voice low. "Three concentrated. One scattered. That must be the Nine."
He turned his gaze toward Isshiki.
"We do this smart," he said. "You stay here."
"What—"
"I'll scout ahead." His tone left no room for argument. "I'll locate any surviving clusters. Once I find where the injured are, I'll come back. You and Ralts go in and stabilize them. I'll handle the Nine."
Isshiki's expression twisted—fear, guilt, frustration—but he nodded. "Alone?"
EMIYA didn't flinch. "I was a Counter Guardian."
Isshiki looked down, eyes on his trembling hands. No bravado. No false courage. Just a quiet kind of determination that unsettled EMIYA more than the usual heroic bluster did.
"…Okay," Isshiki said at last. "I'll do what I can."
That much, EMIYA believed.
He turned toward the town. "If I'm not back in fifteen minutes, stay put."
And then he ran—into the dark, where his kind belonged. The snow muffled everything, even the screams, even the flickers of gunfire and the low, mechanical whir of something bioengineered crawling through the alleyways, all seemed dulled beneath the weight of winter.
But EMIYA heard it all.
His footsteps barely disturbed the ground. He moved like a shadow between buildings—one roof to another, one broken wall to the next—eyes cataloging every detail. Two bodies in a yard. Three huddled survivors under a collapsed porch. One group locked inside a church basement with blood smeared over the door handle—still warm. No sign of the girl Isshiki called Bonesaw yet, though he guessed the biotech must be hers. The other members were easier to pinpoint by their laugher and the screams that came from their direction.
He filed it all away with clinical efficiency, but his mind, traitorous thing that it was, kept wandering back to the absurdity of it all: Waifu Catalog.
What kind of joke system names itself that and then turns out to be horrifyingly real?
A multiversal trafficking scheme dressed up as a horny gamer fantasy.
He was now technically "property." Marked. Not bound, no contracts… but that brand on his lower abdomen was no illusion. He'd checked it in a cracked mirror before he left to scout the first ime. Smooth and arcane. The Company's symbol, stamped like an ownership label.
Isshiki hadn't meant to bind him—he could tell that much. His aura had made lying difficult, and the man's panic was real. Honest, even. But that didn't make EMIYA feel safe.
No bindings for now. But who knew how long that would last?
The Company could easily dangle the option later: "Complete a mission, get a perk." All it would take was one moment of temptation, one decision made out of fear or desperation. And suddenly EMIYA wouldn't be free anymore.
He clenched his jaw, crouched atop a low store roof, and exhaled into the cold air.
He had been pulled from the Counter Guardian role. That much was true. Alaya's tether was gone. The soul-scarring weight of millennia of extermination no longer clung to him like lead chains.
But in its place there was a new collar.
He glanced toward the town's western quarter. Fires glowed there—orange and violent. That's where the main group was. And nearby…A faint sound. Breathing. Wheezing. Children.
EMIYA moved again.
.
He found the pocket of survivors nestled behind a collapsed warehouse—an accidental trench formed when the building buckled inward instead of out. Crates and steel beams had formed a partial barricade, and someone had wedged a school bus across one opening, blocking the view from the street.
It wasn't perfect but it would do.
Eight people huddled together inside. Four adults, three children, and one barely breathing teen with a shattered leg. No heat. No food. No way out. The adults flinched when EMIYA dropped down from the roof, coat fluttering, eyes cold.
He didn't speak. Just assessed. One breath. Two. Then he left.
He retraced his route like a ghost, weaving back through alleyways and shattered glass, back toward the woods where he'd left Isshiki and the small creature still humming softly beside him, calmer than before.
As he moved, his mind wandered again.
This is my life now.
He still didn't know what to call it. He wasn't a Counter Guardian anymore, yes. There was no tug in his chest, no cold void of Alaya watching his every move. But he wasn't free either: A new world and a new "master." A mark branded on his skin. A system that looked like satire on the surface, but was horrifyingly functional beneath it.
And worst of all?
He couldn't even hate the idiot who brought him here.
Isshiki hadn't chosen bindings. Hadn't treated him like property so far. Had looked more apologetic than anyone ever had any right to be. EMIYA had seen nobles summon Servants and treat them like blades with voices. At least Isshiki was trying.
Still.
Trying didn't make a leash disappear. It just meant it hadn't been fastened yet.
He reached the clearing just as Isshiki turned, startled by the sound of his approach.
EMIYA landed softly, straightening.
"I found a spot," he said curtly. "A collapsed building, some intact walls. Survivors are huddled in a warehouse pocket about a half-mile out. Close enough that we can defend it if needed. But hidden."
Isshiki nodded quickly, moving to gather his things—what little he had (like The Company's tablet and some first aid) they had put inside a satchel he found out in the house.
"I'm taking you there now," EMIYA continued as he saw Ralts coming closer, alert. "I'll move injured people to you once you're set up. No need to drag you across a battlefield every time someone's bleeding."
Isshiki blinked. "You're… going to carry them?"
"I'm not going to trust you to wander into unknown combat zones," EMIYA said dryly.
Isshiki flushed, but said nothing.
EMIYA adjusted his gloves. "You'll be safer there. And more useful."
He didn't say and easier to protect.
He didn't need to.
.
The wind bit colder as the night deepened, but EMIYA barely noticed.
He moved through the ruined streets like a phantom, his coat flaring behind him, arms occasionally burdened by unconscious weight—broken limbs, bloody torsos, frostbitten fingers clinging weakly to the last flickers of life.
He carried them all back to the shelter.
One by one.
And each time he returned, he saw the same thing:
Isshiki, sleeves rolled up, kneeling beside the injured with trembling but steady hands. Ralts at his side, red horn glowing with soft, healing light as her paws glimmered with energy.
The green and white creature did most of the heavy lifting—healing deep wounds with a light hum and that strange, horn-borne energy. But Isshiki didn't sit back. He worked alongside her, bandaging lacerations, splinting broken arms, sterilizing wounds. He gave water. Shared food. Whispered comfort like it was a skill.
He was sweating. Pale. Exhausted. But he didn't stop.
Not once.
EMIYA watched from a rooftop during one of his supply runs—blood on his gloves, the weight of another unconscious teen in his arms—and saw Isshiki coax a crying child into drinking water while Ralts softly healed a woman's collapsed lung beside them.
The scene was almost unreal. Something from a storybook.
EMIYA narrowed his eyes.
How long will it last?
Isshiki looked like a genuinely good person. Earnest. Kind. The sort of idealist EMIYA used to be. But ideals had sharp edges and he'd known too many men and women like that—before. Before the betrayals. Before the burning villages. Before the compromises and the compromises after the compromises. Before Alaya.
He had once believed in saving people too... And look where it got him.
So EMIYA was wary. Careful. Not hostile. Not cold, not exactly. But distant. Because kindness wasn't the same as goodness. And goodness didn't always survive contact with the cruelty of the world.
Still, he did his job.
He moved quickly, efficiently. Located survivors. Avoided the Nine where he could. Scouted possible entry points for later strikes. Made mental notes of Bonesaw's growing influence—twisted tools, surgical leftovers, humming drones.
And always, always, he came back to that warehouse trench.
And Isshiki and Ralt were still there.
Still trying.
.
The last of the survivors that could be moved—a man missing part of his leg but still breathing, still blinking—was lowered gently onto a makeshift cot beside Ralts. She pressed her glowing paws against his chest, and the shallow gasping slowly deepened into steadier breaths.
Isshiki, already stained with blood not his own, wiped sweat from his brow as he offered the man a flask of water and a trembling smile. Isshiki's eyes were red, but he didn't cry. He just nodded at EMIYA, gratitude unspoken but clear.
EMIYA stepped back, gaze sweeping the shelter.
Forty-three people now. Most of them injured. Most of them broken in ways healing powers couldn't fix.
He turned toward the chef. "I'm going."
Isshiki straightened. "Going? Where—oh." His voice caught. "You're heading in."
EMIYA nodded once. "I've done what I can here. The Nine are still active. If there are any victims still alive, any I can pull out…" His eyes narrowed. "I'll try."
Isshiki stepped forward instinctively, then hesitated. He looked like he wanted to argue—but there was no argument to make. Not here. Not now.
"Take care," he said quietly. Sincerely.
EMIYA gave a short nod. Then turned, coat billowing as he walked into the darkness once more. He moved without hesitation, tracing the map he had built in his mind—alley by alley, shadow by shadow—until he heard it.
A scream. Not one of fear. One of agony. Short. Gurgling.
He turned toward the sound. The air shifted. He felt it in the pit of his stomach. A wrongness, slick and inhuman.
And then he saw it: The beast. Blood dripped from its claws like ink. Its striped form shimmered with invulnerability, moving through the darkness like a tiger born of nightmares.
EMIYA stopped.
He didn't draw his blades, not yet.
But his focus sharpened.
Time to hunt monsters.