Her voice was soft, yet carried a weight of sincerity that couldn't be ignored.
"We were complete strangers not long ago.
Yet you rescued me from that frozen castle, freed me from the Little Holy Grail, healed my body, and gave me freedom.
You even granted me the right to be a Master and helped me summon Saber.
You've done so much for me Why?"
She couldn't understand.
In the Einzbern family, every action had a clear, cold purposealways for the sake of that millennium-long wish.
But everything Rei Ao had done for her seemed devoid of any agenda.
And that, paradoxically, only made her more anxious and confused.
She needed an answersomething she could grasp, something that would make sense of it all.
Rei Ao looked at her quietly.
At her pure confusion, her searching eyes desperate for truth.
The gentle smile on his face gradually faded, replaced by something more directalmost predatory.
He rose slowly, closing the distance between them.
Under the moonlight, his tall silhouette cast an invisible pressure over her.
But Irisviel didn't step back.
She simply stood her ground, defiant, waiting for his answer.
Rei Ao reached out his hand.
His fingers brushed through her silvery hairsoft and luminous like moonlight itself.
The gesture carried the reverence of an artist admiring a masterpiece.
His gaze lingered openly on her flawless, ethereal face before finally locking onto her crimson eyesso pure, yet trembling with uncertainty.
Then, he smiled.
It wasn't the warm, gentle smile from before.
This one carried a trace of dangerof desire and possessiveness, unmasked and unashamed.
"Why?" His voice dropped to a deep, velvety murmur. "What if I told you I'm simply interested in your beauty?"
"!"
Irisviel froze. Her heart gave a violent jolt.
Rei Ao's fingers slid down the strands of her hair and gently lifted her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze head-on.
What she saw in his eyes was rawlike a beast fixated on its prey.
"Irisviel," he said softly, "you possess a breathtaking beautylike an elf carved from ice and snow, yet fragile and pure like a porcelain doll."
"This contradiction fascinates me."
His words cut through the air, cruelly honest, stripping away every layer of warmth and pretense.
"I took you away, changed your fate, gave you power Perhaps it was simply because I wanted to make you into something"
"that belongs to me alone."
"Does that answer satisfy you? Or does it disappoint you?"
The desire in his eyes felt tangible, as though it could devour her whole.
It was an unfiltered, almost wicked kind of possessivenessso starkly different from the savior-like image he had shown before.
"...!"
Irisviel gasped softly, startled by the bluntnesseven the rudenessof his confession.
Instinctively, she tried to step back.
But Rei Ao's arm slipped around her waist, holding her in placefirm, yet gentle.
Her cheeks flushed crimson, her heart thundering in her chest.
This unmasked intensity was unlike anything she had ever known within the cold walls of the Einzbern castle.
There, people looked at her with indifferenceeither as a tool, or as someone to obey.
Never with eyes that simply wanted her.
And yet, strangelyafter the first shock faded
that heavy weight in her heart finally lifted.
So that's it, she thought.
It wasn't for some noble reason.
Not pity. Not calculation.
Just because of her beauty.
~~~
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Chapter 992: Teach me...
That answer, though a little shallowand even dangerousat first glance, unexpectedly felt real to her.
Compared to airy phrases like "it's for your own good" or "for freedom," this kind of blunt desire was actually easier for an artificial human who knew almost nothing of worldly feelings to understand.
At the very least, it proved that her existence held value to Rei Aovalue rooted in his own personal will.
And it was value as a person,
not as another kind of tool.
She looked into Rei Ao's azure eyesaggressive yet startlingly candidand the confusion and unease in her heart ebbed away.
In their place rose a mixture of shyness and curiosity,
and a faint, secret flutter she herself hadn't noticed.
The room fell into a brief silence; only their soft breathing could be heard.
Hidden in spirit form, Saber was utterly stunned.
Though she cared little for affairs of men and women, she was not ignorant of them.
Rei Ao's unabashed declaration of possessivenessand the ambiguous, dangerous air between the two now
this was entirely beyond the King of Knight's frame of reference.
This man how could he treat my Master like this?!
And Irisvielwhy wasn't she resisting?
Why did she even seem relieved?!
Just as Saber's mind wrestled with whether to reveal herself and break up this perilous moment, Irisviel spoke again.
She lowered her head slightly, avoiding Rei Ao's too-searing gaze.
"I I don't really understand matters of the heart," she murmured.
"No one taught me these things in the castle"
Her voice was barely above a whisper, threaded with unprecedented shyness and a kind of do-or-die courage. She paused, as if mustering all her strength to push the next words past her lips:
"If if I agree, could you teach me?"
Like a stone dropped into a still lake, that sentence sent visible ripples through Rei Ao's eyes.
The dangerous smile on his face shifted at once into something deepermore certain, more intent.
The smile of a hunter when the prey steps willingly into the snare.
"Of course, my Snow White princess."
With a low chuckle, he tightened his arm slightly and, with effortless ease, swept the feather-light Irisviel into his arms.
She let out a short gasp and instinctively looped her arms around his neck,
burying herself against his solid chest.
Her cheeks flushed a crimson so deep it seemed it might drip.
Her heart pounded wildly, but she did not truly struggle.
Holding her, Rei Ao strode toward the bed laid with soft quilts.
"I'll teach youpatiently."
Meanwhile, at the Einzbern castle
the air was colder and more oppressive than ever.
With heavy steps, Kiritsugu Emiya returned to the fortress he once thought would bring hope, but which now yielded only endless frustration.
Ahad appeared almost the instant he entered the parlor.
In the elder's clouded eyes flickered a barely noticeable urgency.
"You're back. Do you have any news of Irisviel?!"
But when he saw Kiritsugu's storm-dark faceand the empty space behind him
that flicker of urgency cooled at once into a foreboding dread.
Kiritsugu didn't answer.
With a self-lacerating calm, he slowly raised his right hand and showed Ahad the back of itsmooth and bare.
"???"
Ahad's gaze froze.
The place where three Command Seals should have been was empty.
"W-what what happened?!"
His voice quivered with anger and alarm.
"Where are your Command Seals?!"
"They're gone," Kiritsugu rasped, his voice cold and sandpaper-rough.
"Not long agowithout warningthey vanished."
"Ahad-sama, the Einzberns have a millennium of lore. Do you know the cause? Is there a way to restore them?"
He clung to a final, fragile thread of hope.
Though he already had his suspicions, he needed confirmation
Ahad stared hard at the back of Kiritsugu's hand, his expression shifting
from shock and fury, to scrutiny,
and finally to utter coldness and contempt.
He had hoped this mage-killer could be the blade to reclaim Irisviel.
But now even the most basic qualification for cooperation was gone.
What good is a Master who cannot even keep his Command Seals?
"The cause? Hah."
Ahad snorted, his tone dripping with undisguised disdain.
"Command Seals are bound to Mastership. Unless the Master dies, or they're forcibly stripped away by a higher authority It seems the man who took Irisviel is more troublesome than we thought."
"As for restoring them?"
"Heh. I've never heard of lost Command Seals being restored."
He stepped back, as if Kiritsugu were something filthy to avoid, and pronounced his final judgment:
"Since you've lost your status as a Master, our cooperation ends here."
"The Einzberns have no use for someone who can't even keep his ticket to the game."
"Leave the castle at once, Kiritsugu Emiya."
"I will handle the search for Irisviel and the matter of that man myself."
His words were like an icy blade, severing the last thread between Kiritsugu and the Einzberns,
shattering the final scrap of wishful hope in Kiritsugu's heart.
He stood frozen where he was, body rigid.
He neither argued nor begged.
But in his downcast eyes, darkness welled like an abyss, and a rage compressed to its limits boiled underneath.
His fists clenched so hard his knuckles blanched.
In the end, he said nothing.
He only looked long and hard at the indifferent Ahad, then spun on his heel and strode away from the place that had once carried his hopesnow leaving only humiliation and despair.
Chapter 992.1: Give Everything, Heterogenous Existence, Fine after the Night...
Outside the Einzbern castle, the wind was knife-cold.
Kiritsugu Emiya slid into his unremarkable sedan, both hands clamping the wheel so hard the veins stood out on the backs of his hands. His face was dark the whole time, his eyes glittering with a vicious gloom.
The plan had collapsed.
Allies had turned their backs.
The Command Seals were gone.
The target had been taken by a mysterious powerhousefrustration and humiliation seared his reason like poison fire.
And yet Kiritsugu was still Kiritsugu.
From the depths of despair and anger, an even more obsessive, colder resolve took root.
He started the car.
"Vrrrm!"
The engine's low roar echoed the beast he was holding down inside.
"Rei Ao Fuyuki City" he murmured, those two names flickering with danger in his eyes.
Even without Command Seals, even abandoned by the Einzberns, he would not give up.
The Grailhe would obtain it.
Any obstacle, human or divinehe would remove by any means necessary.
The taillights vanished into the wind and snow beyond the castle grounds, bearing a man's resolve to fully enter the dark toward an unknown future.
Morning light returned to Fuyuki, pushing back the hush of the night
but not the pall and restlessness clouding certain people's hearts.
Sunlight filtered through the window lattice, falling across two sleeping in each other's arms.
Irisviel's silvery hair spilled over the pillow, tangling with Rei Ao's silver. A faint weariness and the lingering blush still colored her exquisite face. Her sleep was peaceful, contentas if she had finally found her true home.
Rei Ao had been awake for some time.
His iridescent eyes watched the homunculus girl in his arms, fingertips absently twining a lock of her hair, his expression unreadable.
In the corner of the room, Saberstill in spirit formhad stood stiffly almost the entire night.
The unexpected turn of events had shaken the king who upheld chivalry like never before.
She couldn't understand it.
It ran counter to everything she knewbetween king and vassal, Master and Servant, even ordinary men and women. A nameless irritabilityand a sense of loss she would rather not admitlingered in her chest. When the physical constraint eased, she had rushed out of the room.
Meanwhile, in a dim safehouse in Germany, Kiritsugu Emiya had not slept at all. The ashtray was piled with cigarette butts; smoke hung thick in the air. Papers lay spread across the table before himfragmentary records on Fuyuki's ley lines and the history of the Holy Grail War.
Bloodshot veins laced his eyes, but his gaze was quenched steelicy and mad.
The Einzberns' betrayal, the disappearance of the Command Seals None of it broke him. It only drove him deeper into extremity.
The conventional road was cut off.
So he would take the unconventional one.
"Maiya," he rasped into the communicator.
"Change of plan. Abandon all regular channels."
"Activate the black lines. Contact those forbidden seekers in the Clock Tower."
"Tell them I'm willing to pay any price for a way to re-enter the Holy Grail Waror any means to deal with beings not of this world."
On the other end, Maiya Hisau was silent for a moment, clearly shaken by the resolve and danger in his voice.
"Kiritsugu, those people are true madmen. Dealing with them is like seeking skin from a tiger."
"I know," Kiritsugu said, his tone flat.
"But it's our only chance."
"The GrailI must have it."
"For that, I don't mind selling my soul to the devil."
He crushed out his cigarette, a near-ruinous light flashing in his eyes.
"And get ready. We infiltrate Fuyuki as soon as possible."
"I'll find that man called Rei Ao myself."
Fuyuki City, the Church.
Risei Kotominethe supervisor of this Holy Grail Warwas frowning deeply. He had just received an encrypted message from the Holy Church headquarters. Its contents rattled him.
His son, Kirei Kotomine, had completely lost contact after going to the Tohsaka residence; every trace of his presence had been erased by some force.
At the same time, the Tohsaka head, Tokiomi Tohsaka, was confirmed dead. The suspected killer was the Matou family's former head, Zouken Matou. But Zouken had also vanished, presumed dead.
In a single day, of the Three Great Families, one head was dead and another missing. This was an upheaval unprecedented in the history of the Holy Grail War.
What unsettled him even more were hints that some heterogenous existence had intervened in Fuyuki's Grail system.
"A heterogenous existence" Risei murmured, staring through the stained glass toward Fuyuki, a foreboding heavy in his heart. This Holy Grail War would likely be more uncontrollable than any before.
Asleep, Irisviel's lashes trembled. She slowly opened her ruby eyes.
The first thing she saw was Rei Ao's calm face close at hand. Memories of the previous night flooded back, painting her pale cheeks a vivid rose. Yet her heart brimmed with an unprecedented sense of ease and contentment.
Like a lazy cat, she instinctively snuggled deeper into Rei Ao's warm embrace.
Almost at the same moment, Rei Ao opened his eyes as well. The blue of them was clear and wakeful, with none of the fog of sleep. He looked down at the doll-delicate girl in his arms, the corner of his mouth lifting in a gentle arc. He patted her back lightly.
