Emiya Kiritsugu was a man whose life could not be simply told. If one were to see him today, they would see a tired looking male in his early thirties who seemed to be trying to enjoy everything around him with a tired smile. He was a failure as a chef. He traveled a fair bit. He was fairly knowledgeable about military tactics and firearms. But most of all he enjoyed spending time with his son Shiro. The boy was not his own from what he told others, however the two got along so well that it did not really matter…
If one were to see him three years ago, they would have seen a cold calculating man. Emotionless, efficient, precise, ruthless… it would not be far from the truth to call him a monster in some ways. He weighed all lives on the scale of necessity, taking all into consideration and always tipping it so that the least amount of lives was lost. In doing so however, he paved a path of blood for himself that few could hope to match. A master of subterfuge and war tactics, and a practitioner of thaumaturgy, otherwise known as magic.
Emiya Kiritsugu was a Magus… and there was a reason why he was once known as the infamous Magus Killer…
However that was before the ending of the 4th holy grail war… before he rescued young Shirou from the verge of death and adopted him… before he was cursed by the corrupted Holy Grail and the spirit of Angra Mayuu that dwelled within it… before he lost his wife and sacrificed any chance of seeing his real daughter again…
It had been 3 years since the war. In the span of 2 weeks he had played the ultimate game against 12 other individuals paired up like himself and his temporary familiar Saber. The enigmatic king of conquers who desired to rule all… the mysterious and pompous golden king who claimed to own all… an insane cultist who sacrificed children and women for his own sick rituals and curiosities… contemptuous magi who participated only for glory… the noble dual spear wielding knight… the empty priest who gained pleasure only from the misery and suffering of others… it was a secret free for all war that left blood everywhere. He himself had had a hand in ending several of the other participants, and at one point had even destroyed an entire skyscraper in a failed attempt to kill the master of Lancer…
And yet at the end of that secret contest that claimed so many lives in the process… the only result was more lost lives as at the last second, immersed in the corrupted gelatinous liquid that spewed forth from the Grail and clinging onto his sanity and body as both were torn apart from the magical sludge, Kiritsugu saw what had truly become of their goal and the result of any wish that was made using it. He forced his summoned partner, the King of Knights, the legendary King Arthur… who happened to actually be a girl named Arturia and unaware of what had become of her prize, to destroy the grail in order to prevent the artifact from potentially causing mass genocide. Its original purpose, to grant the wish of the winning master and servant of the grail war, was disclosed to him to have been the ultimate monkey's paw, in that the now corrupted item now granted the wish in the form of absolute destruction.
Utilizing it to open the gate to Akashic Records, the swirl of the root, the source of all that has been and all possibilities, the goal of almost all who studied thaumaturgy, as well as realizing the 3rd great magic, were all meaningless to him. He had only participated because he had been hired to, and so he could have his wish granted… to have a world of peace without violence. A world where he would no longer have to sacrifice the innocent in order to save the masses. He was tired of knowing that in order to save the many, the few had to be forfeited…
He could still see the memories in his dreams on occasion. Waiting for his father, who had condemned an entire island's worth of people to death for his experiments, to turn his back on him so trustingly… and pointing the gun at the man's head. He was only a child at that point in time…
Talking to the woman who he considered his mother… who taught him everything he knew about hunting sealing designates and other targets, about pretty much everything after his father's death… flying the plane filled with 300 dead apostles above his head as he sat in an unmarked boat in New York… before using a rocket launcher and killing everyone on board…
Watching as his final order to Saber AKA Arturia destroyed the corrupted grail and caused a chain reaction that for lack of a better term nuked an enormous section of Fuyuki city, where he was living now… killing over 500 innocent people in the area in the process…
Stumbling through the inferno that he caused, looking at all the people that he had murdered, and crying tears of joy as he found that single solitary boy still barely alive… glad that he could save even just that single life from that accursed hell…
In a way he himself was rescued by the boy. It was really the first time he had actually saved anyone in his life. Before all he had done was kill people in order to preserve the lives of the many… however he had never truly gone out of his way to rescue an innocent. Maiya would have counted if it weren't for the fact that she was not innocent at all, a guerilla fighter raised at a young age… she became an assistant to his chaos since she was unable to do anything else with her life… until she was killed by Berserker in an attempt to protect Iriseviel… the homunculus… the living core of that war's holy grail… his wife…
"Iri…" The man sighed as he drank tea on the porch of his home and watched as Shirou stopped attempting magic for the night and went to bed. "What would you say in this situation…?"
He had told Shirou about him being a Magus about a year back and since then against his advice he had been teaching the boy the science of thaumaturgy… well he couldn't say that really. The boy's progress was nearly nonexistent. He could barely get any spells to work even though he seemingly possessed an above average magic circuit. The best the boy could do was gradation air, aka projection, and reinforcing. The former, being the ability to crate objects from pure prana, was nearly useless in the eyes of the magic world due to the fact that it was inefficient compared to finding and utilizing the original object, and the latter, the ability to enhance a base purpose to its fullest such as making food more nutritious or making sticks harder, was too unstable and uncertain for him to attempt right off the bat. He did seem to have a knack for structural grasp magecraft as well, the skill that enables the user to analyze the contents, structure, and purpose of the object he focused on, but that too was nearly useless as other than gaining the user basic information it did literally nothing. Still, it seemed to be all he was capable of doing at the moment. Shirou seemed to have no affinity for the basic 5 elements and it was near impossible for him in his current state to find out what the boy's origin was… hell it would have been unlikely to have found it out when he was in top condition…
The Magus Killer stared at the moon silently, his empty tea cup sitting next to him and the summer moon glowing in the distance. The local insects making for a rather soothing lullaby despite the hard location he was resting. He did not know what time it was at that point, nor for how long he had been sitting there… nor did he care. For not the first or last time the man felt his consciousness fading away in that sitting position, letting his deteriorating body's exhaustion once again get the better of him as he fell into a deep sleep…
Gae Bo…
I ask… Are… master?
Ex… ber!
The images and voiced slowly fogged his mind as if he was barely watching several movies at once and half the scenes were out of order. The actors and effects barely registering as he switched from one scene to another… however as he continued to watch with increasing interest, the voices and images gradually cleared…
Sakura! Wh… happened to you?
…ave to keep her away from Zoken, otherwise he'll just use her and cause more damage.
… the temple! We have to stop him before he completes the ritual!
Trace… on.
… -less battles, meaningless war, meaningless happiness! This isn't what I became a hero for!
… ot! You've been making your nervous system into makeshift circuits every time you used magic? Do you even know how to use the circuits you already have?
…er should have been the one to survive. At lease he knew how the world worked and wasn't a fool… even if he was a faker like you…
No… even in his dreams… this was too real… it couldn't be possible… he had made sure that the leylines of prana in the area would be destroyed in the next 40 years… 20 years before the next war should start… but then how is HE still here?
I am the bone of my sword…
Helo Oni-chan… it's nice to finally meet you in person… Berserker…
Rejoice young man… your wish will finally be granted…
Kiritsugu's eyes flashed open. The scene he had closed his eyes to had been replaced with a morning environment, complete with condensation all over the area and birds chirping in the distance. He barely registered the fact that the morning sun was looming over the horizon or the fact that his aching body was even more ailing than usual from the spot he had fallen asleep in.
"Old man. You fell asleep outside again." Shirou's voice enabled Kiritsugu to further himself from his daze.
"I'm barely 32 Shirou…" The man sighed as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes before looking at the boy with a small wry grin. The red headed 10 year old was already in his day clothes and had his apron on. "I take it you already made breakfast."
"Well you and Fuji-nee aren't." The boy puffed out his cheeks immaturely. "I've had enough fires in my life…"
The magus killer snorted at that comment. While the inferno he inadvertently created was indeed a horrible event, Shirou's experience with flames didn't end there as the kitchen had been the location of at least 8 fires since the boy moved in… though most of them were during a period of time when the local daughter of one of the local yakuza attempted to learn how to cook in their humble abode. To hear the boy retell the story was almost as if he had gone through a holy grail war each time. Luckily though, despite the age difference, the teen and the boy got along just like siblings, which was relieving for Kiritsugu. He had no doubt that when he did die in the near future that Fuji's family would handle his property and take care of Shirou in his stead.