Fate On(e) Savior

Disclaimer: I do not own anything. Not even the overall idea is mine. All characters and settings from media belong to their respective owners. But I'll be throwing in some original characters, who I've created under (most of) the rules of the nasuverse.

Prolog: Kaleidoscope

„A Base of Silver and Steel.

A foundation of stone and the Archduke of Contracts.

And my ancestor, my great Master, Schweineorg.

A wall to block the falling wind.

The gates of all four directions close.

From the Crown, come fourth and follow the forked road to the Kingdom.

Fill, Fill, Fill, Fill, Fill.

Fill Five times.

But destroy each when filled

I hereby propose!

Thou shalt come under my command, and thy sword shalt control my fate.

Abiding by the summons of the Holy Grail, if thou accedest to this will and reason, answer me.

I hereby swear.

I am all that is good in the eternal world.

I am the disposer of evil in the eternal world.

Thou, clad with the Great Trinity, come fourth from the circle of constraint.

Guardian of the Heavenly Scales!"

Angra Mainyu listened to the sound of the summoning ritual. Yes, it was time again. The Holy Grail War. A battle royal where seven magi summoned seven Heroic Spirits, heroes from the past and let them fight against each other. The last one standing would be allowed to claim the Holy Grail for himself and make a wish upon it.

The wish would be fulfilled. But what they didn't know was that after the end of the Third Holy Grail War all the wishes would be twisted. It still would be fulfilled but under different circumstances. Short: A monkey's paw. A wish for money would kill someone else and give his money to you. A wish for eternal life would give you the ability to suck out the life force of others. And a wish for world peace would kill everybody else on the planet. All thanks to the Einzbern who wanted to cheat and summon the Persian god of darkness.

Usually the summoned Heroic Spirits belonged to one of the seven classes: Saber, the Knight of the Sword, Lancer, the Knight of the Spear, Archer, the Knight of the Bow, Rider, the Mounted Knight, Caster, the magus, Assassin, the silent killer and Berserker, the mad warrior. But they didn't want something normal, or rather, they wanted something to give them an unfair advantage, so they created the new class Avenger to summon Angra Mainyu. In that they succeeded. But that was where the good results stopped. Even though Avenger was indeed Angra Mainyu, he wasn't a god, just a normal human who took the name of all evil after his name was expelled from the Avesta, the book of creation. In competition against other famous heroes with abilities far surpassing human imagination he was the first to fall.

But that was not where it stopped. Unknown to everyone Angra Mainyu, who in his life had been forced to take on the burden of all the evil of mankind, became "All the Worlds Evil". And after a Servant was defeated they would be gathered inside the Holy Grail, which would be able to fulfill a wish with the energy it received from the defeated Servants. But now it happened that "All the Worlds Evil" was put into a wish granting device, turning a sacred artifact into a foul Monkey's Paw.

Sixty years after the third war the fourth started. Angra Mainyu amused himself with the struggle for the Holy Grail, knowing very well, no one would get exactly what they wanted. But the fourth war didn't exactly end with a victor. After hearing just what was in front of him Emiya Kiritsugu, one of the participants, destroyed it. And then when the next Holy Grail War started earlier than expected it was his adopted son, who did it.

The second time should have destroyed him completely, but let's just say he had some privileges. Namely the True Magic. Everyone knew that the Holy Grail War had something to do with the third True Magic, heck, the ritual was called after it: "Heaven's Feel", the materialization of the soul, entailing the reanimation of the dead without negative consequences. Yes, that's how powerful Magic really is compared to your everyday magecraft. The first "Denial of Nothingness" lets you create matter out of nothing, the fourth "Oblivion" can erase the existence of something itself. And the fifth "Blue Magic" gives you power to control time.

And that was exactly what he used to get out of this predicament. He traveled back in time, back to the point he was defeated and put into the Holy Grail in the third Grail War. Then he lived the fourth and fifth Grail War again until he got defeated and turned time back yet once again. And again and again. But reliving it for infinite number of times wasn't really fun, so he decided to stack things up a bit by changing the summoned Servants. But since a lot of the Master used catalysts, it was hard to summon someone different.

A catalyst was something that had ties towards a Heroic Spirit. It could be weapons they used in life, parts of their clothes or carriages, sometimes even locations. Using that in the summoning ritual increased your chances drastically to get a specific Heroic Spirit. Something like "part of the round table" corresponded to more than one Heroic Spirit and you would most likely get someone who had a similar personality as the summoner. But most of the used catalysts more or less had strong ties towards the specific Heroic Spirit that made it nearly impossible to summon something different. Furthermore, all together could only summon a Heroic Spirit for every class, reducing the numbers of different Servant constellations even further.

That was when Angra Mainyu suddenly got a brilliant idea: Search for places, where the specific catalyst didn't have any history! In other words: The second Magic "Kaleidoscope", the operation on parallel worlds. That's right, looking into a parallel world allowed him to ignore most ties the catalyst had towards Heroic Spirits in this world, allowing for a greater varieties of Heroic Spirits to be summoned.

However, that alone was not enough. Some catalysts, especially Avalon, the scabbard of Excalibur, had so strong ties to King Arthur that they could summon their respective Heroic Spirits over multiverses away. So he first had to use the third Magic, the materialization of the soul, to anchor the souls of the particular Heroic Spirits to the Throne of Heroes. Only using the second and third together, he finally managed to summon heroes from different parallel words.

And so it was time again that the Masters selected in the fourth Fuyuki Holy Grail War would get different Servants than what they expected!

A/N:

Hey guys and gals, Gashadokuro here.

I've read a lot of fanfictions out there and then decided to make my own. As I already said and as everybody who had read "Fate Zero Sense" by "The Infamous Man" can tell, this story was inspired by him. The settings of the Fate series makes one of the best choices for a battle between characters from different other stories. So it isn't surprising that after the great success of the first story a lot of other people decided to try their hands at this. I, too, was one of them and decided to "quickly" write a story with the characters I wanted to participate. A fair word of warning: I know that I am not the best fanfiction writer out there – seriously, don't you just love euphemism?! – and I have particularly problems with characterizations of people, so there's bound to be some OOC. But I hope I still have managed to write some interesting interaction between the characters.

Now regarding this chapter: I wanted some other reason for Angra Mainyu to switch the Servants than him being bored. Granted, the spark that gets this story started is his boredom, but only after he had to witness the same development countless times, since I think we all agree that the original Fate Zero was anything else than boring. At last anybody who has seen it. And since he already had the third and this story needs the second, why not make it so that the proximity to the wish-granting device gave him limited usage of the five True Magics? That of course meant that I had to give every Magic a name and domain. It was already known that the fifth contained time travel, so the most logical choice would be time control. Although I doubt it is actually so easy.

The fourth was the one nobody knows anything about it as it "concealed itself". So I concluded that it most likely something that either could manipulate memories – or was so dangerous that the creator choose to hide it himself. And thus Oblivion was born. And I don't mean the place were the memories vanish to. No, it is an ability that was created as someone tried to open a portal to the Root by erasing someone's existence and thus access the Records of Akasha. It didn't work though, but he still had one heck of a dangerous ability that he decided to keep under wraps.

If you want to help me, you can leave a review and tell me a) what you like about this story (to motivate me) or b) what doesn't make sense and why (to make me become a better writer). Even if this story is already ten years old and/or finished, any pointers can help me and if not for this story, then for my next.

If you do not want to openly review you can still PM me or leave an anonymous review. Though to the latter I can only reply to when I publish my next chapter.

That said I hope you enjoy this story and if you are still interested, the next chapter with the introductions of the first heroes is already up.

Gashadokuro Amanojaku