Rin Tohsaka: "Huh? What about that question—'What if one day we end up on two diametrically opposite paths?' He's a pretty evil partner, isn't he?"
Shirou Emiya: "Rin... Locke didn't mean it that way."
Matou Shinji: "Are you sure you haven't taken the wrong medicine?"
Rin Tohsaka: "Stinky seaweed! What did you say?!"
After negotiating with Sakura, the four left the Fujimura house and realized that Locke might also be involved in this Holy Grail War.
But as friends, they had never expected this, and they didn't know what role the other party would play in this life-or-death war.
After countless discussions and analyses of all of Locke's recent abnormal behaviors, the group still couldn't find a single clue and finally could only finalize a plan to split up.
In the end, when it was time to part ways, the setting sun dyed the asphalt road at the fork in a warm orange. Matou Shinji was the first to break the silence, shoving his hands in his pockets: "Then Archer and I will go find out where the Lancer is first. You two go ahead."
Shirou Emiya nodded heavily and looked at his childhood friend, his eyes full of solemn trust: "Shinji, please."
Faced with Shirou's trust, Matou Shinji gave him an encouraging smile and replied:
"He's a friend too. No matter what happens, we have to bring him back alive."
After that, he simply turned around and headed toward the Ryudou Temple. The afterglow of the setting sun enveloped his back, disappearing from the publicity and detachment of the past, leaving behind only a completely calm and reliable silhouette.
After walking more than a hundred meters along the embankment, Matou Shinji suddenly spoke to the empty side, his voice frank and a little polite:
"By the way, your name is Archer, right? I'm Matou Shinji. I'll be counting on you for what comes next."
The air was silent for a few seconds. The ethereal Red A looked at the boy before him, who seemed like two different people from his memory, and finally spat out an answer with endless complexity and surprise: "Alright, Shinji."
After a short walk, Red A suddenly took the initiative to ask Shinji:
"By the way, that Locke you mentioned... have you known him for a long time?"
On the other side, the trio was walking toward the fake priest's house. Artoria, in her dark blue cloak, always walked at the back. Her fingertips rested quietly on her sword pouch, with the holy sword hidden beside her, fully focused on defending against possible raids from other heroic spirits.
Rin Tohsaka, walking ahead, tightly interlocked her fingers with Shirou Emiya's, shook their clasped hands, turned her head to his ear, and muttered quietly with a hint of annoyance:
"He's the legendary King Arthur. I'm still angry when I think about it! If it weren't for all the trouble with my clock, this absolute trump card would have been mine!"
She looked up at the base of Shirou's red ears, the tips of her own ears quietly turning crimson, but she still snorted heavily: "But if it ends up in your hands, it's fine. Anyway, what's yours is mine."
"Rin, don't say such misleading things." Shirou Emiya's face instantly flushed, and he was still a bit flustered, trembling slightly.
Rin Tohsaka turned her head away and snorted arrogantly, tightening her grip on his hand, not giving him a chance to relax.
Just as the three turned the corner and were about to head to the Kotomine Church to find the fake priest and get information about the Holy Grail War, their steps fell in unison.
In the shadows of the opposite alley, a white-haired girl wrapped in a fluffy white velvet winter dress was watching them, like an elegant, fragile doll.
A gentle, soft smile played on her face, but there was no warmth in her eyes—only an undisguised pleasure of revenge.
---
Another parallel world, key to pan-human history, located in the frozen region of Antarctica at zero latitude.
Lead-gray clouds, like an eternal night, hung very low. As far as the eye could see, there was an endless, pure white ice field. The cold could freeze the flowing air in an instant. Only Finis Chaldea, the guarantee of human reason—this steel fortress created to protect human reason—stood silently in the endless wind and snow.
The cold light of the general command room contrasted with the pure white ice and snow outside. The heavy alloy door silently opened, and Tachikawa Fujimaru, called the last master of humanity, quickly entered together with Matthew Gilet.
The girl's face still held the sadness of just having woken up. As soon as she entered the door, she raised her voice to the figure before the console and asked:
"Da Vinci-chan, has a new singularity appeared?"
"Ah... how should I put it... if you insist, it should count."
Leonardo da Vinci, who had appeared in the female body of the Mona Lisa, turned around. His face, usually smiling on weekdays, was now full of rare uncertainty.
She raised a finger to the largest main control screen. In the center of the screen, the coordinates were frantically jumping between red [Singularity] and blue [Normal Parallel World], nearly tearing afterimages.
"After all, this is the first time I've encountered such an unbelievable situation—a world that can horizontally jump between singularities and normal parallel worlds."
"Huh??"
The sadness on Goldie's face instantly turned into a blank expression, and her pair of round eyes widened, full of an adorableness that indicated she didn't understand.
Da Vinci looked at her like that and rubbed her forehead in frustration, clearly not suspecting this anomaly, which was completely beyond her reach. Romani Archaman on the side held a cup of coffee, took a sip of the warm brew to suppress the solemnity in his heart, set the cup down, and added in a rare serious tone:
"This anomaly coordinate was captured by Chaldea two days ago."
"But the strangest thing is this: Sheba just recognized it as a singularity that would blur human reason, and half an hour later, it automatically returned to a completely normal parallel world. The fixed value of human reason and the fluctuations of spiritual children were within the standard safety line, so we initially considered it just an observational error and classified it as a low-priority event."
"But just two or three hours ago, the state change of this world suddenly became extremely frequent. It could jump more than a dozen times a minute, completely beyond the system's controlled range. It was a high-risk anomaly that needed immediate attention."
"There's no choice. I can only bother you, Ritsuka."
As the words fell, the blankness and adorableness on Goldie's face instantly vanished without a trace. With a very confident expression, she said to Dr. Roman:
"Alright. Next step—where to kill, who to kill, and how many to kill?!"
"?!?!"
"Then why don't you take these people with you..."
"Count the king in."
"Huh? Lord Gilgamesh, why are you taking the initiative this time?"
The wise king, who had stepped forward on his own initiative, made a hand gesture to shield the surroundings, fixed his gaze on the large screen, and slowly said:
"Because this king always feels that something is wrong. He must go."