The first thing he did was not panic.
The second thing he did was count.
Seventeen minutes, forty seconds. The number assembled itself in the part of his brain he'd trained for triage — cold, automatic, indifferent to the fact that it was describing the window between his current status and unconsciousness. Two Top-Tier Servants. Twenty-seven circuits. The math was not complicated. The math was just bad.
The presence behind the door pressed harder.
He knew that weight. He'd read about it. Fast. Brutal. The kind of Heroic Spirit who resolves situations by removing the people in them, and who had been pointed, with precision, at exactly his location.
The script said Lancer arrives on the second night.He filed that under no longer applicable. The Grail had registered his summoning as a structural violation the moment the second pillar of light hit the ceiling. It didn't need to wait for the war to begin properly. It had a correction mechanism, and the correction mechanism was currently on the other side of his door.
Sixteen minutes, fifty seconds.
He looked at his Servants.
---
Saber had already moved.
Not toward him — toward the door. Three steps, silent on the concrete despite the armor, hand drawing the invisible sword from the invisible scabbard with a sound that was less like metal and more like the air deciding to cooperate. Her shoulders were set. Her chin was level. She had the posture of someone who has fought at doors before and found the geometry favorable.
On his right, Rider hadn't moved at all, which was worse.
She was looking at him with the focused, unhurried attention of someone running a calculation. Her chains had shifted — barely, imperceptibly, except he was watching for it. He'd read about what happened when a Servant's Master became a liability. He'd read about it in clinical terms and was now understanding it in personal ones.
He spoke before either of them could finish deciding.
"Saber." Flat. Firm. A voice he'd practiced because he knew this moment would come and knew hesitation would read as weakness. "Don't move."
She stopped. Not because he'd commanded it — he hadn't touched the Seal, wouldn't waste a Command on something words could handle. She stopped because something in his tone had flagged as information rather than bravado, and Artoria Pendragon had survived long enough to know the difference.
He turned to his right.
"Rider." Quieter. Steadier. "Don't."
Her eyes moved to his face. The calculation in them didn't stop, but it shifted register.
"You know us," she said. Not a question.
"I know everything." He said it the way you say a thing you need to land exactly right — no pride in it, just weight. "I know your True Names. I know your Noble Phantasms. I know what kills you and what you'd die for and what you've already died for once." He held her gaze for exactly two seconds. "Which means I know that if I die, you both fade inside twenty minutes, and neither of you wants that."
Silence.
Above them, the door handle finished turning.
"We're leaving through the floor," he said. "Right now."
---
He'd put the rune in three months ago.
Not because he'd planned for this — he hadn't been arrogant enough to plan for a Lancer arriving seventeen minutes into the first night. He'd put it in because he'd been a man preparing for a war in a basement and basements have one exit and one exit is a problem. The rune wasn't elegant. It was a load-calculation formula tied to a specific trigger phrase, inscribed into the concrete at the edge of the circle's outer ring where the floor abutted the original drainage infrastructure of pre-war Fuyuki.
Fuyuki's old drainage system ran under most of Miyama. He'd mapped it from municipal records. He'd had time.
He said the trigger phrase.
The floor didn't explode. It didn't collapse dramatically. It failed structurally— a six-foot section of concrete doing exactly what concrete does when the load-bearing calculation that holds it together is quietly set to zero, which was drop. Fast, without ceremony, in a cloud of dust and rebar and the grinding complaint of material that had not expected to move tonight.
They dropped with it.
---
The sewers were cold and they smelled like Fuyuki's infrastructure budget, which was to say they smelled like decisions made in the 1960s and not revisited since.
Haruki landed badly and fixed it with reinforcement before his ankles registered an opinion. Saber landed like she'd rehearsed it. Rider simply was in the new space, chains settled, already scanning the tunnel geometry with the quiet efficiency of something that prefers the dark.
Above them, through the hole, he heard the door open.
He did not hear footsteps. Whatever had come through the door moved without announcing itself, which was its own kind of announcement.
He started walking.
Fourteen minutes, twenty seconds.
The mana drain had not stabilized. He'd hoped the physical distance from the summoning circle would bleed off some of the structural tension in the contract, but the fracture in his Command Seal didn't care about distance. It was pulling from both sides simultaneously — two Servants, two tethers, and the fracture point where they joined was him, and it was widening.
He was going to lose consciousness in fourteen minutes unless he did something he had not wanted to do this soon.
He stopped walking.
"I need you both to come here," he said. "Close."
Saber turned. In the dim light filtering down through the hole above — already fading as the tunnel bent away from it — her expression was the particular combination of wariness and controlled patience that he'd read described and was now seeing operate in real time. "Explain."
"The contract is tearing itself apart because it wasn't built for two." He kept his voice even. "The prana I'm expending isn't sustainable. I can stabilize it, but I need physical contact with both of you simultaneously to recalibrate the link architecture. It won't take long." He paused. "I know what it involves. I'm asking anyway."
Rider had drifted closer while he was talking, which was slightly alarming in the way that all of Rider's movements were slightly alarming — not threatening, exactly, just efficient in a way that made you aware you weren't tracking them before they'd already happened. She studied him for a moment.
"You're going to feel everything," she said. "Both of us. Simultaneously."
"I know."
"That's not a comfortable experience."
"I know that too."
She looked at Saber. Saber looked at her. Something passed between them that was not communication exactly — more like two separate threat assessments arriving at the same conclusion.
Saber stepped forward and held out her arm.
He placed his right hand against the metal of her vambrace. The Seal burned where it touched the contact point.
He placed his left hand on Rider's shoulder — bare skin above the edge of her suit, warmer than the tunnel air, very still under his palm.
He opened his circuits and pushed.
---
It was not like anything he'd prepared for.
He'd understood the theory of it. Prana exchange between Master and Servant was intimate by mechanical necessity — the circuits interfacing, the Od crossing the boundary between one person's spiritual architecture and another's, the sense of a presence that wasn't yours moving through the pathways that were. He'd understood it intellectually, clinically, the way you understand that a surgical procedure involves cutting.
Understanding it and experiencing it were not the same operation.
Saber hit him first because she was on his dominant side and his dominant circuits were louder. It was cold — not the cold of temperature but the cold of principle, of something that had been refined down to its essential nature through decades of holding a single conviction against everything that wanted it to bend. It was the cold of a wind that came from somewhere very high and had not been warmed by anything on its way down. Sharp-edged. Painfully clean. It moved through his circuits like a corrective force, like a hand that straightens a crooked angle not to be cruel but because the crookedness was the problem.
Then Rider.
Different. Completely different. Heavier — not oppressively, but densely, like a smell that occupies a space rather than just existing in it. Old in a way that Saber's cold wasn't old — Saber's cold was ageless, but Rider's was ancient, full of something that had accumulated in the dark for a long time. It moved slower through his pathways than Saber's, but it went deeper, found the spaces between the channels rather than traveling down them. It was not unpleasant. It was extremely uncomfortable. Both things at once, and they didn't cancel.
Having both simultaneously was—
He stayed upright through an act of will that cost him something he didn't have a name for yet.
The fracture in his Command Seal stopped widening. The tethers stabilized — not integrated, not clean, but ,braced, held in tension against each other in a way that was sustainable if not efficient. He took his hands back. He breathed.
"That'll hold," he said. His voice was steady. He was fairly proud of that. "Let's move."
Eleven minutes. He crossed it off. Not needed anymore.
He kept walking.
---
The secondary safe house was twenty minutes through the drainage system and three minutes of careful rune-work to get into — an abandoned basement apartment in a building that had been slated for demolition twice and reprieved twice by the specific bureaucratic inertia that protects ugly buildings in cities that can't agree on anything. He'd stocked it four months ago. He hadn't expected to use it on the first night.
He sat down on the floor, because the chairs were under a tarp and he didn't have the energy to uncover them.
Saber stood in the center of the room with the contained energy of someone practicing patience as a discipline. She'd been quiet through the tunnels — watching, cataloguing, saying nothing that didn't need saying. Now she turned to face him with the expression of someone who has finished being patient and has moved into a different mode.
"You will tell me," she said, "how a Third-Rate Magus knows the True Name of a Servant who has not yet spoken it."
Rider had settled against the far wall. She did not ask anything. She waited, which was somehow more pressuring than the question.
He looked at his right hand. The fractured Seal caught the light from the battery lamp he'd clicked on — two incomplete geometries, still faintly warm.
All right. He'd known this conversation was coming. He'd rehearsed it. He'd rehearsed seventeen versions of it, in fact, across four years of knowing it was inevitable.
"I know the future," he said. "Or I did. I knew a future — a specific set of them, in detail. Every Servant in this war, their identities, their Noble Phantasms, their weaknesses, their choices." He met Saber's eyes. "The Grail is corrupted. Has been for a century. Whatever it grants, it does it by flooding the world with the contents of the mud at its core, which is not a metaphor — it's a curse on the scale of a natural disaster dressed up as a miracle. Every Master in this war who wins gets to cause a calamity and call it a wish."
Saber's expression did not change. It went very still, which was different.
"And you know this," she said carefully, "because."
"Because I've read how it ends." He didn't soften it. Softening it would read as uncertainty, and uncertainty was something he couldn't afford to display right now. "Multiple times. Multiple endings."
"You've read it."
"It's complicated."
A long pause.
"You're telling me," Rider said, from the wall, in the same quiet voice she used for everything, "that you entered a war you know is structurally unwinnable, with a summoning ritual you modified yourself, and produced this—" a small gesture indicating everything, the fractured Seal, the two of them, the tunnel-damp basement, "—intentionally."
"The dual summon was not intentional."
"That's the part you're clarifying."
He conceded this with a slight movement of his head. "The Grail is already reacting to the anomaly I created. It's accelerated the timeline — Lancer arriving on night one instead of night two is the first deviation. There will be more." He looked between them. "Your options are as follows. You can fight each other, waste the prana neither of us has, and we can all fade gracefully over the next few days. Or you can extend some provisional trust to the man who just saved both your contracts by jumping into a sewer, and let me show you a path through a war that I am fairly certain has never been run this way before."
He waited.
"I am not asking for faith," he added. "I'm asking for time. Enough to prove the intelligence is real."
Saber was quiet for a long moment. He watched her work through it — the king's calculus, the evaluation of evidence, the specific weight she gave to the fact that he'd named her accurately, that he'd moved correctly, that nothing he'd done in the last twenty minutes had been the action of someone improvising from ignorance.
"You are asking me to follow a man I met eighteen minutes ago," she said, "into a war I don't fully understand, on the basis of knowledge you cannot yet prove you possess."
"Yes."
"I have done more on worse terms," she said. And something in her voice went quiet in a way he hadn't expected, a door closing on something old. "I will extend the time you're asking for. Do not waste it."
He looked at Rider.
She was already looking at him. Her expression told him nothing and probably never would.
"I make no promises," she said, "except that I'm listening."
He'd take it.
---
He reached up and clicked the battery lamp to full brightness to start going through the supply cache.
The table came into view.
He stopped.
He'd stocked this safe house himself. Four months ago. Alone. He knew exactly what was here, had inventoried it twice, had not been back since. He knew the contents of this room down to the specific placement of the emergency circuits kit on the second shelf.
The table was bare except for one thing.
A pendant. Gold chain. A red jewel in a simple setting, cracked down the center — a crack he recognized from a specific scene description in a specific route in a specific version of the story he knew so well he could have written it from memory.
A pendant that should be in Rin Tohsaka's workshop right now, intact, held in reserve for a use she hadn't found yet.
A pendant that was not supposed to be here.
He picked it up. The jewel was cold. It was real. The crack ran all the way through.
He'd spent four years learning this story. He knew every character, every catalyst, every object with narrative weight. He knew what this pendant meant and where it should be and whose hands it should be in and at what precise moment in the Fate/Stay Night timeline it served its function.
He knew — with the sick, settling certainty of a man watching a corner piece of a puzzle snap into place in the wrong section of the image — what its presence here meant.
He hadn't just summoned two Servants.
He hadn't just broken the war's arithmetic.
Somewhere in Fuyuki tonight, a teenage girl had performed her summoning ritual, and the catalyst had failed to respond, and the slot she'd been meant to fill had come up empty.
He hadn't entered the story.
He'd taken someone's place in it.
He set the pendant down on the table.
"Change of plans," he said.
---
[End of Chapter 2: The Eighteen-Minute Deadline]