Preparations for the trip to Fuyuki City had entered their final stage.
The Mage's Association's formal approval had come through. Waver's status as "Supervisory Representative" and Seiji's as "Temporary Observer" were both confirmed.
In this last stretch of preparation, Seiji devoted the bulk of his energy to gathering intelligence.
By day he was Waver's most capable assistant; by night he turned into a ghost within the Clock Tower's networks.
He used the access privileges Waver had granted him and his ever-growing ability to infiltrate the Clock Tower's internal network, and began collecting, in a frenzy, the files of every "designated participant" in this Holy Grail War.
Marisbury Animusphere, Lord of the Clock Tower's Astronomy Department, an ambitious genius.
The files showed he had already secured a massive injection of funds from some Middle Eastern syndicate, and was secretly conducting a summoning ritual of some kind on a large scale.
Ergo, member of the Mage's Association's "Communal Apartment," a mysterious necromancer. Intelligence on him was scarce. All they knew was that he had recently been buying up large quantities of Holy Relics related to the pharaohs of ancient Egypt on the black market.
...
One name after another, one dossier after another, all sorted by category and stored in the system's database. He was like a top-tier wargame player who had to read the bottom of every opponent on the board before the opening move.
But what he focused on most were two names located in Japan, two names destined to stand at the center of this storm.
Rin Tohsaka.
Sakura Matou.
Late night.
The lights were off in Seiji's room. Only the faint white glow of the computer screen in front of him cast a light over his face, which betrayed no emotion.
On the screen was a photograph of Rin Tohsaka.
It had been taken when she had received the title of "Second-Ranked Honor Student of the Clock Tower."
The girl in the photo wore her glossy black hair in twintails and a red top, with a confident, proud smile on her face.
Her eyes were as bright as two stars, full of the haughty pride of a genius.
"Rin Tohsaka..."
The tip of Seiji's finger lightly traced the girl's cheek on the screen, as if touching a fragile work of art.
"The idol of the Clock Tower. Genius of the Modern Magecraft Department. The Tohsaka family's once-in-a-century 'Five-Element User.' Mastered the essence of Jewel Magecraft. Top of her class in both theory and practice. The genius hailed as 'Ever-Victorious'..."
He read out the comments in the file under his breath, the corners of his mouth curling into an amused smile.
"What a... perfect résumé. Perfect to the point of... being nauseating."
He understood this kind of "genius" all too well.
They were like flowers cultivated with care in a greenhouse, raised from infancy in praise and expectation, used to having everything under control, used to solving every problem with their superior minds.
Their pride was both their strongest weapon and their deadliest weakness.
Because the moment they ran into a force that "didn't play by the rules," their proud confidence would shatter more completely than anyone else's.
"If you were to crack a gemstone this beautiful from the inside, watching it splinter little by little, the sound would surely be exquisite, wouldn't it?"
He murmured under his breath, like a madman about to take a chisel to a perfect work of art.
He marked Rin Tohsaka's file as "Primary Conquest Target (Psychological Level)." He was going to break this favored daughter of heaven, spiritually, from the ground up.
Then he opened another encrypted file.
Inside was a single blurry photograph, apparently extracted from surveillance footage.
The background of the photo was a gloomy Japanese-style estate.
A girl with long purple hair, looking somewhat timid and morose, was walking down a corridor with her head lowered. She wore ill-fitting old clothes, her eyes hollow, like a doll without a soul.
Sakura Matou.
A soft tsk tsk tsk escaped his lips.
Seeing this photograph, Seiji could not help an admiring exhalation.
If Rin Tohsaka was an uncut, radiant gemstone...
then Sakura Matou was an uncarved jade, steeped in venom and filth, with boundless treasures inside her.
"A fragment of the Grail... a bearer of the imaginary number attribute... tortured for ten whole years by that old worm Zouken Matou and his Crest Worms..."
He looked at the appalling descriptions in the file. There was not the slightest pity in his eyes. Instead, they were full of a burning greed, the kind a man feels at discovering a peerless treasure.
"What a perfect 'vessel.'"
Her body, her soul, they're like a sheet of white paper that those worms have already smeared pitch-black. As long as I can turn those worms... into my own color...
Then the only name that can be written on that white paper is mine.
He marked Sakura Matou's file as "Highest Priority Target (Physical / Soul Level)." He was going to claim this girl's very existence at the root.
These two sister-flowers: one light, one shadow.
One proud as a blazing sun, one humble as dust.
They were like the two sides of a mirror, together forming a perfect stage filled with dramatic conflict.
And he, Seiji Fujiwara, would be the sole director of this drama.
He would break that beam of light with his own hands, and then dye that patch of shadow in his own color.
He shut the computer, stood up, and walked to the window.
Outside, London's night was still wrapped in fog.
He looked at the great clock tower in the distance, and it was as if he could already see, months from now, the feast of blood and fire that was about to unfold in Fuyuki City, Japan.
"Rin Tohsaka, Sakura Matou..."
...
...
There were only two weeks left before they departed for Fuyuki City.
Waver's preparations had entered a white-hot phase.
He was practically living in his Workshop, calibrating various Mystic Codes every day, etching defensive runes, and preparing tools to handle every kind of unexpected situation.
Seiji, meanwhile, used this time to demonstrate to Waver, in flawless fashion, his irreplaceable value as an "assistant."
That day, Waver was tearing his hair out over the power-source problem for a "portable defensive barrier."
"No good... using a mana gemstone as the core burns through it too fast. It can sustain high-intensity defense for ten minutes at most. That's nowhere near enough in a Holy Grail War!"
"If I use my own mana to maintain it... my mana reserves aren't enough to support a long battle either... damn it, if only that idiot King were here, with his Gordius Wheel..."
In the Workshop.
Waver paced back and forth in agitation, the floor scattered with gemstones that had been ruined when their mana structures collapsed and with scorched diagrams.
"Teacher."
Seiji, who had been quietly sorting materials to one side, suddenly spoke.
"Perhaps we don't need to be bound to the 'single core' line of thinking."
"What do you mean?" Waver stopped pacing and turned to him.
"What I mean is..." Seiji picked up a blank diagram and began drawing on it rapidly. "Why can't we borrow a page from how ordinary people fight wars?"
"Look here." He sketched out a clear structural diagram. "We can produce a batch of standardized 'Mana Batteries,' each one storing a set quantity of mana in advance."
"Then we design the core of this defensive barrier with a structure similar to a 'magazine.' When one 'Mana Battery' runs out, we can swap in a new one in under a second."
"That way, as long as we prepare enough 'batteries,' the barrier can, in theory, last indefinitely!"
Waver stared at the clean, lucid "magazine-style" structure on the diagram, full of the design logic of modern industry, and froze on the spot.
This was... an option?
Weren't magus battles supposed to rely on one's own mana and the performance of one's Mystic Code?
This way of fighting, swapping cartridges like an ordinary person...
It sounded crude and graceless, but...
Damn it, it actually seemed extremely useful!
"But... making this kind of standardized 'Mana Battery' requires extreme precision and stability. Most alchemists couldn't pull it off. And the cost..." Waver raised the obvious concern.
"Please leave that to me." Seiji smiled confidently. "My family may have fallen, but in the craft of 'precision fabrication,' we still have some skill."
With the system's help, never mind Mana Batteries, even building a miniature nuclear reactor by hand wouldn't be much trouble for him.
Over the next few days.
Seiji gave Waver a perfect demonstration of what "unparalleled support talent" actually looked like.
The "Mana Batteries" he designed were no larger than a cigarette pack, their casings made of a special alchemical alloy, the interiors etched with miniaturized energy-storage runes. Compact, stable, and extraordinarily efficient.
The "alchemical potions" he refined, by adjusting the molecular structure of the herbs, were thirty percent more potent than the originals, with half the side effects.
He even designed an "auto-targeting and intelligent defense" support program for Waver's famous Mystic Code, the Volumen Hydrargyrum.
One inconceivable, eye-poppingly practical "invention" after another emerged from his hands.
Waver had gone from initial shock to a kind of numbness.
He looked at this young man bustling about the Workshop, that humble smile always on his face, and an absurd feeling welled up in his chest.
Had he hired an assistant, or had he hired a monster capable of pushing the entire modern magecraft industry forward by a hundred years?
But that absurdity was quickly replaced by enormous delight and relief.
With Seiji along, their odds of surviving this trip to Fuyuki City had gone up by at least fifty percent!
"Seiji..."
That evening, looking around the Workshop at the mountain of "batteries" and various devices glowing with mana light, Waver could not help sighing.
"Sometimes I really wonder if you're even human."
"You're joking, teacher." Seiji wiped the machine oil off his hands and answered modestly. "I'm just... a little better at these small clevernesses. Once we're on the battlefield, my paltry mana probably couldn't hold up the simplest defensive rune. I'll have to rely on you completely."
He emphasized, once again, with perfect calibration, his own "weakness" and "harmlessness."
The remark dispelled the last trace of wariness in Waver's heart, the wariness born from facing someone so terrifyingly talented.
That was right.
No matter how much of a genius he was, he was still only a theorist and a craftsman.
His Magic Circuits were his fatal flaw. In the world of magi, that was the most insurmountable chasm.
On a battlefield like the Holy Grail War, swarming with monsters, no matter how brilliant the mind, without strong power it was only a castle in the air.
He was someone Waver needed to "protect."
At that thought, a powerful sense of responsibility welled up in Waver as a "teacher" and a "senpai."
"Don't worry," he said solemnly to Seiji. "Once we're in Fuyuki City, just stay close to me. As long as I, Waver Velvet, still have a breath in me, I will never let you come to any harm."
"Yes! Teacher!"
A look of overwhelming "emotion" came over Seiji's face. There were even hints of tears in his eyes.
But on that lowered face, deep in those dark eyes, a cold mockery flashed by.
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