Ch 6: Encounter

It is human nature to challenge the rules of the world.

A man walks along a road. The same road he walked in his youth, but in the opposite direction. He is walking to meet his younger self.

What will he do when he meets him?

The answer was obvious. It was the same answer he came up with over and over after countless iterations of the same war, not that his master knew that.

The man believed he had seen all that was to see of the time period he found himself in. Though the events could vary wildly, the start of the war was always the same.

"It's unfortunate, but being a hero is a limited-time thing. When you grow up, it gets hard to call yourself one. I should have realized that earlier."

The man's journey started with the end of another. A passing of a baton, to finish a race which had no finish line. A race he wanted to prove had a finish line.

The red cloaked man wants nothing more than for his legs to stop.

What he wanted to become could not be compared to what he became in the end.

In life, he had sought to save everyone in his sight, yet lacked the power to save those closest to him nor was he perceptive enough to be aware of the horrors those closest to him have experienced.

He was always helpful to others, and helpful to a fault. He was a prime modern example of an upstanding citizen, yet as he grew older, he grew aware of his biggest sin, the sin of ignorance.

He sought out to fight evil, yet he overlooked the very evil that was present during his daily life.

The various iterations of the 5th Grail War were both a blessing and a curse. A possible chance of freeing himself from his duties as a Counter Guardian, but at the same time he had to see those nostalgic faces he had failed in life and possibly fail again.

Fate had seemed to play a cruel joke.

Archer and Rin had sensed a Servant, but this Servant wasn't Lancer who was after Emiya's life. Emiya Shirou was stabbed in the heart by Lancer hours earlier, but Archer's master had decided to save him. The red cloaked man was quite upset at that decision, but it was that same decision that allowed him to be summoned as a Servant so he couldn't complain, but what he saw in front of him, he wanted nothing but complain and curse at fate, as his master spoke the following words.

"Imaginary...demon?"

On her way back the the Emiya Estate, Ilya had encountered an enemy master and her servant, both clothed in red. By calling upon her Servant to take her place, the little white haired girl in front of the red clothed pair was replaced with a black haired one and then the Tohsaka master, uttered the following.

"Imaginary...demon?"

A true demon, was simply born from nature, while an imaginary demon was called into existence by human wishes. Such demons possessed warped common sense and in turn possess "Reality Marbles". "Reality Marbles" are not unique to demons, humans can manifest them as well if they were "distorted" like a demon. As such the ability to project the soul unto the landscape, the ability to replace normal reality was considered a forbidden technique.

They were curses that acquired material form based on the images created by humans, in that sense they are similar to heroic spirits.

Just like heroic spirits, humans could not match a demon. Demons did not need magic circuits like that of a human magus to use magecraft. With the nature of their bodies, simply the act of releasing prana was enough to realize mysteries.

There was no need for complex invocations for a demon to perform magecraft like a human mage, the only exception are the Einzbern with their Wish-Granting Sorcery Trait.

Ilya had never considered such a possibility.

When her Servant takes her place, it would undoubtedly seem like a demon possession or a demon hybrid losing their sanity, like in the case of the Tohno's. Between the line of human and demon, a Tohno's hair would become red, but Ilya wasn't human and her hair didn't turn red.

Ilya was a homunculus, an artificial extension of nature.

A demon is an extension of nature, albeit a disruptive one.

Existences that are both a part of nature yet are foreign to it.

Both being spiritual existences, one could displace the other, but never mix.

A demon could possess a human, but could a demon possess another spiritual being?

Though Ilya was half-homunculus, her augmented body should have been farther from human than any other homunculi, but such thoughts were ultimately pointless to her.

Ilya had found her resolve long ago. At the end of the Grail War, only death awaited her, so she didn't have to waste her thoughts of trivial curiosities. There was only one question she needed to know the answer to.

As the girl had looked into the starry night sky several nights ago, her Servant had asked her about her intentions in the war which she had nothing to gain from and Ilya had simply answered,

"Death is inevitable."

Placing "Homura's" soul gem next to her heart she gathered her resolve to continue talking.

Can you feel it?... This cheap container won't last more than a year... If I'm going to die, I'll at least die knowing the answer to the question that has been on my mind for these 10 years."

As a Servant and as a magical girl, "Homura" had an obligation to carry out the little girl's wish.

The black haired girl stared at the white haired man, and the man simply stared back.

In front of the man was a girl he believed he would never bring himself to kill, yet if the girl was possessed by a demon, then the only right thing to do was to cut her suffering short.

In front of the girl was a tall tanned man, brandishing twin dao of inverted contrast, she brandished her pistol.

The girl had no weapons that could harm the man effectively, but every weapon she possessed should be more than enough for the red clothed Tohsaka girl beside him.

Targeting Archer's master was a gamble. An Archer-class servant could survive a considerable amount of time without a master supplying a prana. In the case of some, it could be an indefinite amount of time, but surviving was not the same as being able to fight.

A master-less Servant was easy pickings regardless of the class. With her "noble phantasm", escape was easy.

The girl with the hourglass shield with her power over time and nearly unlimited arsenal, she could perform an attack with no blind-spots.

The red knight of the bow before her only had 2 swords in his hands. A Heroic Spirit could surely block a few mundane bullets, but could a Heroic Spirit block all the bullets fired by another "Heroic Spirit"?

"So red knight, do you have enough swords to block with?"

The red knight simply smirked.

The girl may have possessed nearly unlimited bullets, but unbeknownst to her the man truly had "unlimited blades", but unfortunately, neither had a chance to show off their arsenals as the they were interrupted by a blonde girl clad in blue who created a crater in the ground separating the two.

So began a confrontation between bullets of almost limitless quantity, blades which were truly unlimited and no weapon at all?