Author Notes: Last chapter before getting to the start of the war. Things should get a bit more exciting around then.

Now, answering a few questions that popped up in reviews, if you don't care, feel free to skip down a bit:

Berserker's Sanity: Yes, Madness enhancement is something that can be turned on or off. Illya never turned it off on Hercules in the fifth grail war, but it mentioned her shackling his mind as a spiteful punishment at one point, if I recall correctly. This Berserker will only activate Madness Enhancement during a fight, and only when either becoming too angry, or enjoying the fight too much. Other than that, she'll likely be a bit more easy to upset, and so be trying to keep a firmer hold on her emotions when not comfortable showing them to someone. Also, yes, everyone has guessed who Berserker is already. Fun times will be had with a scene where she and Kirei have a talk, as with her and Saber being in the same war, with EMIYA there to ensure the Havoc is Maximized.

As for why I switched the normal Caster for this Berserker rather than just having him become a Berserker? Honestly I just wanted to throw in something extra that was different to make the story a bit less likely to be a carbon copy of any similar ideas that may or may not be floating around somewhere. That and the character interaction will be quite fun. It had been this idea, or having Kariya summon our new Berserker and seeing Gilles de Rais freak out. Pure funny lost out however to the more serious idea.

EMIYA's changes: -TLDR: Lots-

Stats are altered due to class being changed to Caster, but some skills were kept or enhanced due to his being summoned within spitting distance of where he collapsed during the Fuyuki Fire as a child. Also, I'm having it be that EMIYA himself changes even though he shouldn't by canon, as a way to explain just how extreme his depression and self loathing became after becoming a Counter Guardian, despite "Dying with a smile" before hand. By canon, though he keeps unordered knowledge which he can access from the records, he doesn't actually get memories from his actions as either a CG or Servant, same as any other Heroic Spirit. The reasoning for this was that they were supposed to be kept outside of the time line to prevent themselves from changing from the 'perfected state' that allowed them to become a Heroic Spirit, or something like that.

As he has changed where no other normal Heroic Spirit does, he had to be finding some way to cheat - with Unlimited Blade Works, of course. Thus, he has memories of his time during the Fate/Stay Night game's three routes, with the 'Good End' on UBW actually being the most recently experienced from his point of view. He doesn't have memories from beyond when he was taken out of the war in the Fate and Heaven's Feel Routes, save for whatever he might have learned on any runthroughs of the Fate route where he might have managed to survive slightly longer while faking his death after the Berserker Fight. By the end of the UBW route, Archer had reconciled with some of his problems, and thus could be reclassified as Good aligned, even if he'll have relapses to True Neutral fairly regularly when in serious combat.

The combination of the 'retaining true memories of summonings' and 'being summoned in the ideal location' are part of why he has an Independent Action Skill despite not being an Archer as well. The Grail is treating it as having become a personal skill for him now, though at a low rank. Also, the Wiki mentions the connection that the Grail War has with the third magic might allow Servants to keep some of their memories of being summoned regardless.

Finally, as for having outlines vs. not? Yes, I have basic outlines of where I want a story to go. Nearly all of my stories are derailed by the characters however at some point or another, though never quite as bad as when I DM a table top game.

Incidentally, EMIYA is terrible at naming things.

Now back to the story.

The fourth Holy Grail War.

It was this war which created him; which orphaned him and killed the child he might have been to give birth to Emiya Shirou. It was this war that lost Illya her parents, and doomed her to becoming the fifth war's lesser grail; doomed to die even if she survived the war.

This war had ended in fire and death, leaving hundreds dead... or worse.

Arch- no, it was Caster this time, and didn't that feel odd? Caster was sitting outside of the small, nondescript inn that his new Master had found for them, going over what he could remember hearing about the fourth Grail War. It wasn't all that much.

For one thing, he knew nothing about his current Master, other than his name. Presumably, he was some relative of Sakura's who hadn't lived through the Fourth War in Caster's own time-line. He had this nagging feeling in the back of his head when he thought about that fact, though he couldn't figure out what it was from.

He had never paid much attention to learning more about history that didn't concern him directly back then, leaving such things to Rin. Add to that the length of time it had been for him, and he had barely been able to remember Rin the first time she summoned him for the fifth grail war. He could have simply used the married blades to look back at his past, but he had stubbornly refused, not wanting to be reminded of how he was in his past.

Getting torn apart by Berserker had knocked some sense into him about that, at least.

He no longer had such reservations obviously – for all that he still found his younger self frustratingly naive and dense – but he hadn't been so diligent in making sure to record all of his memories and history into his blades until shortly before he had left the clock tower. He was able to find vague recollections of some things, and crystal clear memories of others from that time period.

After meditating on his blades for a few minutes, he had ordered his knowledge of the Fourth War as best he could: Obviously, Saber was here, acting as the Servant of his father. Gilgamesh was this war's Archer, and he remembered being incensed when he had found out about some of the atrocities committed by that war's Caster.

If he had been summoned in place of that Caster though, that wouldn't happen, and even if he didn't have Discernment of the Poor, he was sure Kariya wasn't the murderer who had summoned the original Caster. So his knowledge, minimal though it was, was already possibly skewed by his summoning. The only other things he had learned about this war had been related to what had happened to his father.

Not much to go on, but he wasn't coming in completely blind unless every Servant had somehow been switched out or something absurd like that. More likely, this time-line's Alaya had decided to preempt the potential danger of the previous Caster by having him summoned in that class.

That all meant that Gilgamesh was the biggest threat, outside of the corrupted grail itself. At full power, he could act as a counter to Gilgamesh – especially as Caster rather than Archer – but he couldn't count on being at full power with Kariya as his Master. That meant he needed to find an alternate source of Prana before he could risk serious confrontations, or abuse his Item Creation abilities and Territory Creation abilities as Caster.

He couldn't simply stay on the defensive though. Not if he wanted to have a chance to save anyone. The War, left to its own devices, would find some way to ruin lives, simply by its nature. He needed to be able to run interference while he figured out how to fix things for the most people he could.

That really settled what he needed to do first, while he waited for the War to be officially started. He stood, and walked into the kitchen of the inn, setting up a small bounded field to start creating a small Territory. He needed to have a space to work on experimenting with his Item Creation ability, and what place was better for him to create in than a kitchen?

Kariya woke up disoriented, finding himself in an unfamiliar room. Blinking back his sleep, his memories from the previous night came back to him; summoning his Servant, and checking in at an old inn using hypnosis to prevent questions.

Speaking of Caster, Kariya wondered where he'd gotten off to. Then again, it would get awfully boring just watching him sleep, and Servants didn't typically need to sleep themselves. Shrugging the issue off for the moment, Kariya quickly cleaned himself and got dressed for the day, before checking his link to Caster to track him down.

He followed the thread of prana out of the room and down a hall, towards... the kitchens? That wasn't quite where he expected to find Caster, but who was he to judge? Reaching the kitchen and spending a small amount of prana to convince a couple of the staff that he was permitted inside, he opened the doors, and walked in.

He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't to find himself being led to an apparently empty corner of the room, by an outdated stove that looked to have been replaced recently. Curious all over again, he stepped forward to the stove-

-And found himself stepping into a sweltering forge. The room was far larger than the kitchen behind him had been, with giant gears turning in the walls and ceiling above a blacksmith's workshop. Swords littered the hard packed earth around him, and more weapons sat on the walls, seeming to outline the space in steel.

Before him, Caster stood, shaping a sword that was different from the ordinary slabs of steel around him. Kariya couldn't quite see it, and it was clearly not yet done, but it had a definite feel of power to it.

Caster paused in his work, and the sword he'd been working on wavered and vanished. He turned to face Kariya with a smile. "Ah, I see you're awake, Master. Did you need something?"

Kariya snapped himself out of his stupor, reminding himself of why he had come. "Right, you mentioned planning last night. I figured we could talk now that I'm awake and not falling over from Prana depletion."

Caster nodded, and projected a chair to sit in. "Right then," he started, gesturing to a second projected chair. "Based on what you said last night, I'm going to assume that you're not going to be able to support me much in combat."

Kariya hung his head. "Just about any magus will be able to take me out within a mater of minutes. Sorry for being such a burden."

Caster rolled his eyes. "That's fine though; Fighting is a Servant's job, so you aren't actually at as big of a disadvantage for that as you might think. Our biggest problem is going to be the fact that you don't have the prana capacity to support me at full strength right now. That means we have to be a bit more careful about things, and that I'll need more time to recover after serious fights. Other than that though, what are you good at?"

Kariya had to think for a moment, before he shrugged. "Photography, journalism, and maybe first aid. I've done some work as an EMT before, and I freelance as a reporter when I need extra money. I don't see where any of that will be helpful in a war though."

Caster leaned back, and crossed his legs. "Then you can work on keeping us up to date on anything strange in the city. Talk to people you know, and see if you can't dig up rumors on what the competition might be up to. Maybe figure out a way to monitor our enemies. Other than that, try to find somewhere we can set up that's a bit more permanent – I can work here some, but it's not going to work for my full Territory. Maybe see if we can't set up somewhere with a powerful Ley-line."

"I'll see what I can do." Kariya was just happy to have something to make him feel useful, all things considered. "I'll try to get you the names of as many of the other Masters as I can find, and I'll check on the places in the city we could set up at." With a bit of hesitation, he added "...Thanks for this."

As Kariya was walking away, Caster called out to him "Out of curiosity, what are you doing this for?"

To this, there was only one answer he could give, and Kariya said with conviction, "I have someone I need to save."

Caster turned back to his swords, an odd expression twisting his features, and the sound of metal striking metal carried itself to Kariya's ears until he left the Territory.

A salary man woke up with his head pounding. Had he been drinking last night? He tried to get to his feet, only to find that he was laying on concrete with his hands bound. Panicking, his eyes flew open, and what he saw terrified him.

He was in a cell. Somehow, between the previous night and... whenever now was, he had been thrown in a cell that smelled of blood and decay. It was like a sewer that someone had been dumping bodies in, and a small treacherous voice in the back of his head was screaming at him that he was going to be the next one.

He had heard the missing persons reports that had been going about, and had listened to people talking about a mass murderer in the city, but he hadn't really paid attention. People did horrible things all the time, and other people died as a result. It was just how the world was.

He hadn't thought he was at risk though. It hadn't been quite real to him, with young women and children being the majority of the victims. He wasn't a family man, so he was supposed to be safe from the psycho.

Still paralyzed with fear, he nearly missed the cell door slamming open to reveal a heavily armored figure. Nearly, being the key word.

As the white and red armored figure walked towards him, he hurriedly tried to wiggle his way away from it, reduced to trying to get away by any means he had. Then a voice rang out from the demonic knight.

"Stand." The command wasn't something he could resist, and he found himself managing to make it to his feet despite his bindings. "Do you want to live?" It asked him.

Was it actually here to save him? Yet then why were his instincts telling him that this creature was dangerous to him? He found his voice and asked "W-what's going on?"

The figure glared at him with it's piercing green eyes, and he could feel the disapproval it held for his question. "Do you want to live?" It asked again.

"Yes!" he shouted. A thousand times yes, he wanted to live.

The Knight tossed him a sword. "You've been kidnapped by a murderer. Kill him, and you live. Fail, and he'll kill you."

He bent over to reach the sword, realizing his hands were still bound. Looking back up to ask for help, he saw that the Knight was gone, leaving the door open. How someone wearing so much metal could possibly move so fast was beyond him, but he wasn't in any state to consider it. He fell next to the sword, and began sawing through the ropes binding his arms.

Freed, he yanked the sword up from the ground, and carefully started out of the cell.

And so the hunt began.

Ryuunosuke Uryuu wiped his sword on a cloth, looking down at the body of the man below him with a sort of euphoria. Behind him, Berserker watched him with a critical eye. "Your form was terrible," Berserker commented, as critical as it had been since he had summoned it the previous night. Even so, he couldn't possibly object after having been shown how great it could feel to fight someone trying to kill him back.

"I'm self taught," he replied, hardly able to stop himself from giggling. He was bleeding from a few places where the Salary-man had gotten lucky, and he had only survived due to the reflexes he'd developed over the course of many murders. It was simply so different, fighting an opponent who was coming for him too, armed and ready to kill him.

He didn't think he'd ever be able to go back.

He held out the sword, now wiped clean, to his side, and the small boy took it from him before hurrying back behind Berserker. He was still getting used to the 'Squire' that Berserker had insisted on turning the almost-sacrifice into, but he had to admit that it was nice to have help cleaning up after a kill.

He spun on the balls of his feet and leaned towards Berserker with a manic grin. "That. Was. Awesome!" he shouted, finally unable to contain himself. He couldn't tell through the helmet, but he felt as though his new teacher was smiling at him. "What are we going to do next?"

Berserker waved over to some sticks in a corner of the room. "I'll be training you in the basics so that you aren't as much of an embarrassment next time. First though, we need to take care of your fallen foe; you don't provide much Prana on your own, so we'll be putting him in the circle I drew earlier. Everyone you beat like this, we'll toss in to improve my reserves. It will only work within a few minutes of the kill, so start moving him."

"I really don't understand too well, so I guess this is a demon thing?" he happily asked as he pranced over to the body. The Salary-man looked like he might even still be alive, though not for much longer with the hole in his gut. Ryuunosuke shrugged and picked the man up, putting his back into moving him to a carved mess of symbols in a circle.

"Done!" he shouted energetically, eagerly skipping back to where Berserker held a pair of long sticks. Catching the one tossed to him, he tried out a few poses, before settling into something that didn't feel too awkward.

Berserker walked over to him, and slapped his legs into a slightly different stance, lifted his arms, and then shifted his back. "Better." Berserker then walked back a few paces and turned. "Now, defend yourself!"

As Ryuunosuke's world became pain for the foreseeable future, the young boy looked on in a mix of terror, and a gleeful sort of satisfaction, seeing his family's murderer beaten about mercilessly with a tree-branch. Then he pulled out his dagger, and started moving through the simple form that the Armored Lady had shown him while the Murderer found his Prey. Maybe some day, he'd be strong like Her, and not have to worry about people like the Murderer.

Kariya's first action in his quest for knowledge was fairly straight forward, for all that it would take some time to finish: He walked down to one of the local newspaper's offices and purchased the backlog of the last month's papers, while getting a subscription to be delivered to his post box. He could scan through the papers later in the day and get a feel for if anything unusual was going on that might be linked to the War.

Tracking down some of his old colleagues wasn't too difficult from there either, but convincing them to give him tips on anything they heard was... trickier. All of the conversations tended to be a varriation of the same script:

Kariya would find them, and say "Hey, I haven't seen you for a while. How have things been going since I've been out of the loop?"

The colleague would take a moment to place him, smile, and say "Oh, Kariya, what a pleasant surprise! Things have been hectic the last month or two, but other than that, same old grind. What brings you around here?"

Kariya would admit to needing a good source of information, trying to phrase it in a way that didn't sound like he'd be stealing their story out from under them. Something along the lines of "Well, I'm wanting to get back into the business in a bit, but I'm rusty as heck from my year's absence. Mind sharing any juicy rumors and stories you get early on so I can practice on them? I promise I won't try to publish anything, and I'll even offer any ideas or insights I have on it in return; no need to cite me."

The colleague would hem and haw over the idea that he could sell the information to others in the field, but acknowledge that he was good with finding unusual angles that they might miss sometimes. Some would refuse based on contract, others would accept if he agreed to edit their write ups too some of the time, and others just promised to throw him extra scraps that either weren't big scoops, or that they didn't have time to follow up on.

To round things out with the other journalists and reporters, he'd found someone who liked focusing on Celebrities a bit more than most, and had developed excellent stalker skills. He'd offered them the tidbit that some notable foreigners might be showing up in the city soon, trying to stay low key, and asked that he be told anything that they could give him on foreigners acting strange.

Over all, it had been a lot of work for what might be very little returns, but he felt better for having done something for preparation for the Grail War. Finishing with that, he broke out the back log and started reading.

A few papers in, and his better mood had soured with a terrible haste.

There was a murderer on the loose. A Mass murderer who people had been calling a demon, and who had apparently been leaving occult symbols around some of his kills. Something that could easily be explained by a careless and corrupt Magus trying to collect extra prana for their Servant through the fastest method available to them.

The worst of it though was that most of the victims so far had been children. He stowed his papers and headed down to the police station. It was time to brush off the old journalist's hat and do some investigating.

Caster finished the sword he was working on, and allowed it to be recorded in Unlimited Blade Works. It wasn't as powerful as many of his collection, but it was the first original sword he had made, mixing and matching traits and properties of various other weapons into something new.

Maybe it was just his new Class influencing him, but he could all but see different opportunities spreading out before him in the form of countless blades, each with their own new trick to catch opponents off guard. He would certainly be abusing his chance to utilize the Caster Class's Item Creation ability to its fullest to expand on his armory's utility as well. Daggers that could track a target when placed over a map, swords that could cut through the distance separating him from his destination, and others were only the tip of the iceberg of things he had planned.

It would have been easy for him to lose track of himself and simply Create more and more swords, if not for his constant awareness of the dangers that the War would subject people to. Even so, until the war started getting under way, or his Master gave him some current information to work with, there wasn't much to do that would be more useful than what he was doing. And so he indulged himself some.

His first new sword was a homage to his more frequent Master; Tohsaka Rin. He had based the properties of the blade on the gandr spell that Rin had always favored, and pulled a bit from the curse on Gáe Bolg, among other bits and pieces. The result was a cursed blade that would reach out to weaken and sicken those it was swung at, slowly chipping away at their strength without needing to draw blood, yet never able to kill no matter how deep the wound.

He couldn't help but wonder what it said about him that his first instinct for his original creation was a curse though.

Over all though, it was still a first attempt, and he didn't yet have the prana to burn on something truly spectacular, so he'd gone with something efficient. As a Fake Noble Phantasm, it would rank as a 'C' at best, and copies of it would be degraded to 'D' ranks, but it had potential to be useful in a fight with anyone with low Magic Resistance or Luck. An actual hit, even a scratch from it, would probably let him bypass Magic Resistance too, at least to a point.

Now, all he needed was a name. He looked at the short, thorn like blade, close in length to Kanshou and Bakuya, but closer to a gladius in style. It was a wickedly sharp blade meant for stabbing and cutting alike, and was wreathed with an ominous black mist of magical sickness, sure to make opponents uneasy and wary of it. Yet, in a sense, it was intended to allow him to fight opponents with the option of not killing them through overwhelming force. Something that gave an impression of being violent and hurtful, and then turned around and was nice, even while denying the fact...

It really was a good homage to Rin. Ultimately, he was finding himself stuck between making a Tsundere joke, and trying to give it a name that fit a sword. Perhaps something like Sword of Denial? It sounded like a proper weapon name, and it fit it's property of sapping an enemy's strength – Denying them a fair fight, or denying them their power either way – yet it was still a private joke for him.

It wasn't as though it really needed a name, but all of his most powerful blades held names, and it somehow seemed right to name his creations. Deciding he could always revisit the naming options later if he needed to, he sent his new sword into an astral state, ready to be called later on.

He was just about to start work on his next attempt when he felt Kariya returning through his link. With a sigh of resignation, he stepped away from his forge, and waited for his Master to arrive, hopefully with something to show for his hours of work.

When Kariya entered the temporary Territory, Caster noted that he appeared distinctly agitated. He had seen his new Master depressed, confused, depressed, hopeful, depressed again, and determined. Yet he hadn't actually seen him fuming like this. From what little he'd seen of his Master, he had a bad feeling that the only things that would get him angry would be similar to things that would have set his own younger self on a war path.

Kariya looked him in the eye, and said "There's a mass murderer killing kids and leaving occult marking behind at some of the scenes. He's been doing this for about a month or two, though they haven't found the markings or the bodies in the most recent week or so."

Well, that was succinct. "Am I to assume then, Master, that we will be hunting this killer? Given the timing, I suspect it will be another Master and their Servant."

"I already assumed that was a possibility," Kariya confirmed, "but that doesn't matter. I can't let myself sit idly by in this situation; not if I have the power to help. You're a Hero, so you understand already, right?"

He did, even if he was only a fake Hero. In fact, it was probably because he was a fake Hero that he understood so perfectly. The words of his younger self echoed in his ears once more: There's no way that wanting to help people can be a mistake. Well, what could it hurt?

Caster shrugged. "Hm, what a troublesome Master I have. It would appear that we have our first target then. I'll start putting something together to help out, though we still need a proper base of operations."

Kariya nodded. "There are two main places that would work from a prana standpoint: The temple on Mount Enzou, which would be much to obvious even if it would be highly defensible for proper magi, or the area around City Hall. Luckily, there's a residential area right near by City Hall, and some basic hypnosis isn't outside of my abilities. If I can encourage a family to leave for vacation for the week or something, we'll be able to set up as the caretakers."

Caster paused for a moment as a thought struck him. He was technically about to go home to the neighborhood he had grown up in before the fire. He smiled and nodded, hoping his amusement didn't show too much. "As you wish, Master." Fate was having all sorts of fun with him for this war, wasn't it?