"Master, what exactly are we waiting for?"
The blonde-haired girl whose locks shimmered with hints of pale cherry and gold sat beside Su Mo, curiously eyeing her Master.
Most Heroic Spirits had their own wishes. It was for that reason they responded to a summoner's call and became Servants.
So, generally speaking, both Servants and Masters had strong reasons for wanting the Holy Grail.
But that logic didn't apply to these two.
In the beginning, Su Mo had only wanted a teacher.
Of course, he did have a desire for the Holy Grail—otherwise, he wouldn't have received a response to his summoning. But his goal wasn't as grand as others'.
As for Okita Souji, she too had a wish she wanted to fulfill.
However, her wish wasn't something that required the power of the Holy Grail…
After becoming Su Mo's Servant, her long-held wish had already been fulfilled.
Her life had ended in her youth, and her only regret was not being able to fight alongside her comrades until the very end. That had been her one true desire—to battle to the last with her comrades. So, when Su Mo previously said he had no intention of fighting for the Holy Grail, Okita Souji didn't mind in the slightest. Her wish had already been granted. From now on, all she needed to do was follow her Master's orders.
Still, even so, she couldn't help but feel curious about Su Mo's actions. On this cold winter night, he had dragged her out just to sit in the park for what felt like an eternity. Even as a Servant, she could feel the chill seeping in.
"We were originally waiting for a serial killer to get off work," Su Mo said casually as he finished the last sip of his hot coffee, "and I figured I'd bring you out for a bit of shopping too."
"But now it seems that won't be necessary."
His goal tonight had been simple—just to take care of Ryunosuke Uryuu while he was in the area. That man, chosen by the Grail in the original story, was a twisted killer who found joy in murder. Even in this world, people like that were rare.
So, Su Mo had scoped out his workplace the day before. He hadn't acted then, to avoid causing a scene, and had planned to strike tonight instead. But now, he realized, there was no longer any need.
"A killer?" Okita Souji frowned upon hearing this, her expression filled with disgust. Even in her own time, there had been people like that—monsters who tested their blades on civilians. She had always loathed those who took pleasure in taking lives.
"Yeah, the guy by the bar entrance," Su Mo said offhandedly.
"—"
Okita looked up, her gaze landing on the brightly lit bar nearby. At the entrance, a cheerful-looking young man with orange hair was chatting with a woman beside him. Most people probably wouldn't have noticed anything wrong. In fact, they might've even found the young man charming, dangerously so—which explained why women were often drawn to him.
But Okita wasn't most people. She was sharp. Just one glance and she saw it—that twisted air about him. He wasn't like the killers she'd known, but he was certainly just as warped.
"So that's the killer, huh? I'll go take care of him right now!"
From the glint in Ryunosuke's eyes, she could tell he'd already marked that woman as prey. It was only a matter of time before he struck. Without hesitation, Okita gripped the hilt of her blade and prepared to eliminate him.
But Su Mo stopped her.
"Wait."
She paused immediately at his command, releasing her grip and turning to him with a puzzled expression.
"Master? Weren't we here to deal with him? Or are we waiting until the crowd clears?"
"Yes... but not exactly."
Su Mo nodded, then shook his head. As Okita looked even more confused, he tilted his head and glanced up at the sky.
"There's a saying from my hometown," he said slowly. "People who commit too many sins will be struck by lightning."
His voice was calm as he turned back to her. "Do you believe in that?"
Okita blinked. Her expression turned somewhere between amused and bewildered.
"Struck by lightning for doing bad things? That sounds like something you'd tell a kid... I can't believe Master's this childish—"
But before she could finish, her words were drowned out by a deafening crash.
BOOM—
From the clear, starry sky above, a bolt of lightning came crashing down with overwhelming force. Like divine judgment, it split the night open and struck the ground.
"What the—lightning?!" Okita turned in the direction of the strike, stunned.
Then she froze.
At the bar entrance, the man who had just been laughing and chatting a moment ago now lay on the ground, charred black and unmoving. Clearly, he'd been hit directly. And yet, the few people standing nearby were completely unharmed—as if the lightning had chosen only him.
"What... just happened?!"
Okita blinked in disbelief.
"Was that... divine punishment?"
She was utterly dumbfounded.
It took her a few moments to recover. But when she did, she shook her head. No way. If divine punishment really existed, there wouldn't be any bad people left in the world.
Besides, this clearly wasn't just some freak coincidence. Not with what Su Mo had said right before it happened.
Which left only one possibility.
"Master, how did you do that?!"
She immediately clung to Su Mo's arm, her eyes sparkling with curiosity and awe. "You can control lightning? Wait—are you actually really strong? Were you testing my loyalty all this time to see if I was worthy of being your Servant?"
After all, throughout history, the power to wield lightning had always belonged to gods. Seeing him do it naturally made her imagination run wild.
...Though perhaps a bit too wild.
"I just... awakened a bit of my old power, that's all."
Su Mo waved it off casually, but as he spoke, he opened the magical pathways within his body.
"Still, I have gotten a lot stronger than before."
The moment he unsealed those channels, an immense surge of mana rushed through the bond between Master and Servant. Originally, Su Mo had very little mana—just enough to keep Okita materialized. But now, after fusing the powers of every Su Mo from the Mist Space, the volume of mana within him was on par with a dragon vein. It flowed like a flood, filling Okita in an instant.
What was negligible for Su Mo was an overwhelming tide for her.
"Mmm... Master, your mana is too much!"
Never having held so much power before, Okita's frail body was overwhelmed. Unable to handle the sudden influx, she collapsed into Su Mo's arms with a soft whimper, her face gradually turning red.
The atmosphere... got a little awkward.
Several minutes passed before Okita finally recovered. By then, her mana had reached its absolute limit. As she felt the power now coursing through her, she sat there in stunned silence.
"Master... just who are you, really?"
Even a Servant like her—someone from the modern era where the mystery of the world had already thinned—had been pushed to A-rank status just from his passive supply of mana. In fact, all her stats had risen to A and above, catapulting her from a near-weakling to a top-tier Servant.
Just from his mana alone.
It was absolutely absurd.
"Also… you call that just 'a little stronger'?"
Okita Souji felt like everything she had come to understand through the Holy Grail's knowledge had just been turned on its head. That wasn't "a little" improvement—it was a colossal, outrageous leap!
In response to her disbelief, Su Mo just gave a helpless shrug.
"I'm just a passing Demon King, nothing special."
"Demon Kings are not normal!" she instantly shot back, unable to resist the obvious retort.
....
....
At the same time Su Mo used the Authority of the [Lord of the Sky] to summon divine lightning, elsewhere in Fuyuki—right in the city's most luxurious commercial district…
On the thirty-second floor of the Hyatt Hotel, the penthouse suite—
"Boom!"
A deep, thunderous rumble echoed through the air. One of the Twelve Lords of the Clock Tower and a current participant in the Holy Grail War, the magus Lord El-Melloi Archibald—known more commonly as Kenneth—frowned as he looked in the direction from which the lightning came.
"Thunder at this time of year?" he muttered.
It was unusual. Kenneth specialized in mineral and spirit evocation thaumaturgy, not atmospheric phenomena. While freak weather sometimes occurred even on clear days, it was rare enough to make him pause.
He might've brushed it off—if not for his Servant.
Golden particles of mana began to gather beside him, slowly forming the radiant figure of his Lancer-class Servant. With a sharp, chiseled face and a heroic presence, the man narrowed his eyes toward the distant skyline.
"Master, that lightning… it wasn't natural."
"…Oh?" Kenneth raised an eyebrow.
"If it's enough to catch your attention, then it must have been quite out of the ordinary."
He trusted his Servant's instincts without hesitation. "Lancer, did you sense anything specific?"
Lancer stepped forward to the window, silently gazing at the fading stormlight. A strange hesitance came over his expression as he finally replied, "…I believe I sensed the presence of a divine being."
In this modern era where the Age of Gods had long since ended and true deities had vanished into myth, such a claim would normally be dismissed as madness.
But Kenneth knew better than to doubt his Servant's judgment.
And in this moment, with the Holy Grail War approaching its peak, it wasn't entirely out of the question that some other Master had summoned a god-adjacent Servant.
"Could it be that one of the other Masters has managed to summon a divinity-class spirit?" he mused aloud. "Hmph… it seems I can't afford to look down on these amateurs."
Despite his words, Kenneth's expression betrayed utter confidence. That slicked-back hair, that calm gaze—it radiated the self-assured belief of someone certain of victory.
Even if others summoned a demigod, he would come out on top.